Salt Improper Access Control

published 2016-04-12 10 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-vqh4-crjf-jjxx , PYSEC-2016-23 , EUVD-2016-0033

cvss: 8.1; version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 1.5%; EPSS 1.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 74%
public exploits: 0; none known

Salt 2015.8.x before 2015.8.4 does not properly handle clear messages on the minion, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to execute arbitrary code by inserting packets into the minion-master data stream.

Patch / fix

fixed in 1

pypi salt 2015.8.4

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2016-1866 updated 2025-11-21 cvss 4.3

salt: Improper handling of clear messages on the minion

Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.2 salt Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 salt
not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.52% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 74% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
NVD	3.0	8.1	CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD	2.0	6.8	AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
GitHub	3.0	8.1	CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem	package	affected	fixed in
pypi	salt	>=2015.8.0rc1, <2015.8.4 >=2015.8, <2015.8.4	2015.8.4

Classification

Weakness

CWE-284 Improper Access Control

References

lists.opensuse.org /opensuse-updates/2016-03/msg00034.html
vendor-advisory, web
docs.saltstack.com /en/latest/topics/releases/2015.8.4.html
web, vendor-advisory
nvd.nist.gov /vuln/detail/CVE-2016-1866
advisory
github.com /pypa/advisory-database/tree/main/vulns/salt/PYSEC-2016-23.yaml
web
github.com /saltstack/salt
package
github.com /advisories/GHSA-vqh4-crjf-jjxx
advisory

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

Summary