Security Vulnerability: Salt remote code execution issues aka CVE-2020-25592, CVE-2020-16846, CVE-2020-17490

This document (000019775) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Manager
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12

Situation

Security researchers from Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative and Salt developers have identified and fixed three security issues in salt, two of them allowing remote code execution.

All users of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Manager are affected.

The following issues exist :

CVE-2020-16846: An unauthenticated attacker with network access to the Salt API could use shell injections to run code on the Salt-API using the SSH client, allowing remote root code execution.
CVE-2020-25592: eauth tokens were not properly validated when calling Salt SSH via the salt-api. Any value for “eauth” or “token” would allow a user to bypass authentication and make calls to Salt SSH, allowing remote root code execution.
CVE-2020-17490: Salt minions or masters that previously used the create_ca, create_csr, and create_self_signed_cert functions in the TLS module, were exposing the created certificates to local attackers.

Resolution

SUSE will be releasing updates that will address this issue.
These salt security updates should be installed in order to resolve the reported issues

Workaround

In case the updates needed to resolve this cannot immediately be applied, a workaround would be blocking ssh access to the salt-api. This might however reduce its functionality.

Cause

CVE-2020-16846
CVE-2020-25592
CVE-2020-17490

Status

Security Alert

Additional Information

Salt stack announcement:
https://www.saltstack.com/blog/on-november-3-2020-saltstack-publicly-disclosed-three-new-cves/

Disclaimer

This Support Knowledgebase provides a valuable tool for SUSE customers and parties interested in our products and solutions to acquire information, ideas and learn from one another. Materials are provided for informational, personal or non-commercial use within your organization and are presented "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.