CVE-2023-20897 Salt vulnerable to denial of service

What is CVE-2023-20897?

CVE-2023-20897 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Saltstack Salt, published on 5 Sep 2023. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Salt masters prior to 3005.2 or 3006.2 contain a DOS in minion return. After receiving several bad packets on the request server equal to the number of worker threads, the master will become unresponsive to return requests until restarted.

Weakness: CWE-404

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-20897?

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

Products include Saltstack Salt.

How do I fix CVE-2023-20897?

Upgrade salt to a fixed version for your release line: 3005.2 or 3006.2.

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-2023-20897 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-20897 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-vpjg-wmf8-29h9, PYSEC-2023-166, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-20897.