CVE-2012-1987 Puppet Denial of Service and Arbitrary File Write

What is CVE-2012-1987?

CVE-2012-1987 is a low-severity denial of service vulnerability in Puppet Puppet Enterprise, published on 29 May 2012. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Unspecified vulnerability in Puppet 2.6.x before 2.6.15 and 2.7.x before 2.7.13, and Puppet Enterprise (PE) Users 1.0, 1.1, 1.2.x, 2.0.x, and 2.5.x before 2.5.1 allows remote authenticated users with agent SSL keys to (1) cause a denial of service (memory consumption) via a REST request to a stream that triggers a thread block, as demonstrated using CVE-2012-1986 and /dev/random; or (2) cause a denial of service (filesystem consumption) via crafted REST requests that use "a marshaled form of a Puppet::FileBucket::File object" to write to arbitrary file locations.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2012-1987?

4 open source packages ship an affected version, including puppet. It affects 2 products.

Products include Puppet Puppet, Puppet Puppet Enterprise.

How do I fix CVE-2012-1987?

Upgrade puppet to a fixed version for your release line: 2.6.15 or 2.7.13.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2012-1987 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2012-1987 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Puppet Puppet Enterprise

• CVE-2016-2785 Puppet Improper Access Control Critical 9.8
• CVE-2021-27021 SQL injection in Puppet DB High 8.8
• CVE-2018-6513 Privilege escalation in Puppet Enterprise and Puppet Agent High 8.8
• CVE-2018-6514 Privilege escalation in Puppet Agent High 7.8
• CVE-2018-6515 Code injection in Puppet Agent High 7.8

All Puppet Puppet Enterprise vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2012-1987, GHSA-v58w-6xc2-w799.