CVE-2016-3176 Salt Insecure configuration of PAM external authentication service

What is CVE-2016-3176?

CVE-2016-3176 is a medium-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in Saltstack Salt, published on 31 Jan 2017. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Salt before 2015.5.10 and 2015.8.x before 2015.8.8, when PAM external authentication is enabled, allows attackers to bypass the configured authentication service by passing an alternate service with a command sent to LocalClient.

Weakness: CWE-287

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-3176?

5 open source packages ship an affected version, including salt. It affects 1 product.

Products include Saltstack Salt.

How do I fix CVE-2016-3176?

Upgrade salt to a fixed version for your release line: 2015.5.10 or 2015.8.8.

Upgrade, and rotate credentials and sessions that may have been exposed. More about Authentication bypass.

Is CVE-2016-3176 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-3176 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Saltstack Salt

• CVE-2013-4437 SaltStack insecurely uses /tmp Critical 10.0
• CVE-2013-6617 SaltStack Privilege Escalation vulnerability Critical 10.0
• CVE-2021-33226 Code injection in n/a Critical 9.8
• CVE-2021-25315 salt-api unauthenticated remote code execution Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-15751 SaltStack Salt Remote command execution and incorrect access control when using salt-api Critical 9.8

All Saltstack Salt vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as GHSA-v2rp-9cpj-pfw2, PYSEC-2017-33, SUSE-SU-2016:0970-1, SUSE-SU-2016:0972-1, SUSE-SU-2016:1343-1, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-3176.