CVE-2014-4678 Ansible Code Injection Vulnerability

What is CVE-2014-4678?

CVE-2014-4678 is a critical code injection vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 20 Feb 2020. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The safe_eval function in Ansible before 1.6.4 does not properly restrict the code subset, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via crafted instructions. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2014-4657.

Weakness: CWE-74

Which versions are affected by CVE-2014-4678?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including ansible. It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Redhat Ansible.

How do I fix CVE-2014-4678?

Upgrade ansible to 1.6.4 or later.

Upgrade, and never evaluate templates, expressions or code built from user input. More about Code injection.

Is CVE-2014-4678 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2014-4678 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2014-4678, GHSA-66c7-5pwv-mm3j, PYSEC-2020-203, UBUNTU-CVE-2014-4678.