CVE-2016-8628 Ansible fails to properly sanitize fact variables sent from the Ansible controller

What is CVE-2016-8628?

CVE-2016-8628 is a high-severity command injection vulnerability in Red Hat Ansible, published on 31 Jul 2018. An attacker needs administrator access to exploit it, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Ansible before version 2.2.0 fails to properly sanitize fact variables sent from the Ansible controller. An attacker with the ability to create special variables on the controller could execute arbitrary commands on Ansible clients as the user Ansible runs as.

Weakness: CWE-77

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-8628?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including ansible. It affects 1 product.

Products include Redhat Ansible.

How do I fix CVE-2016-8628?

Upgrade ansible to 2.2.0.0 or later.

Upgrade, and pass arguments to programs as a list instead of through a shell. More about Command injection.

Is CVE-2016-8628 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-8628 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Red Hat Ansible

• CVE-2014-4657 Ansible Remote Code Execution Critical 9.8
• CVE-2014-4966 Ansible Arbitrary Code Execution Critical 9.8
• CVE-2014-4967 Ansible Arbitrary Code Execution Critical 9.8
• CVE-2017-7550 Ansible Insertion of Sensitive Information into Log File vulnerability Critical 9.8
• CVE-2014-3498 Ansible Arbitrary Code Execution High 8.8

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2016-8628, GHSA-jg4f-jqm5-4mgq, PYSEC-2018-38, RHSA-2016:2778, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-8628.