Authentication Bypass in salt (CVE-2016-3176)
Summary
Authentication bypass in salt (CVE-2016-3176). Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure. Mitigation: upgrade to 2015.5.10, 2015.8.8 or later.
Original description
The description as published by the source.
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.
Source: NIST National Vulnerability Database NVD GitHub Advisory
Auto-generated summary
Assembled by SecPulse from the source data (CVSS, CWE, affected versions) using templates — no AI involved. Check the original description and references below for exact details.
A vulnerability tracked as CVE-2016-3176 has been found in salt.
Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure. CVSS score: 5.6/10.
What to do: upgrade salt to 2015.5.10, 2015.8.8 or later.
If unsure, ask your IT team or search "salt CVE-2016-3176" on the vendor's site.
CVE-2016-3176 (salt) — CWE-287 / CVSS v3 5.6
Attack vector: remote (network-reachable) / unauthenticated / no user interaction
Patched: 2015.5.10, 2015.8.8 — apply immediately
Plan: 1) Audit SBOM/dependencies, 2) Stage→prod upgrade, 3) Add WAF/proxy monitoring on affected endpoints, 4) Hunt IOCs in logs.
Refs: see the GHSA / vendor advisory / patched release linked on this page.
Authentication bypass (CWE-287) exists in salt.
Check the vendor advisory for the affected versions of salt.
Severity: Medium (CVSS 5.6/10). Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure.
Update to 2015.5.10, 2015.8.8.
Until the patch is applied: disable the affected feature, apply WAF rules, or restrict access via network ACLs.
Search webserver/proxy logs for unusual request patterns matching this CVE's known IOCs. Run grep -r 'salt' . against your dependency files (package-lock.json, requirements.txt, go.sum) to find affected services.
Response actions
Concrete steps and command examples for SOC/SRE teams to execute in order
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1Identify exposure identify
grep -r 'salt' . | grep -v node_modulesリポジトリと本番環境の依存ファイル (package-lock.json / requirements.txt / go.sum / Gemfile.lock 等) で
saltを grep し、稼働しているサービス・バージョンを把握する。 -
2Apply patch patch
Upgrade salt to 2015.5.10, 2015.8.8ステージング環境で 2015.5.10, 2015.8.8 に上げて回帰テスト → 本番反映。回帰テストはアプリの主要ハッピーパスを含めること。
-
3Post-deployment verification verify
Confirm patched version is live in productionパッチ適用後、ステージングで PoC または同等の悪用パターンを再現して脆弱性が閉じたことを確認。本番ではアクセスログ・WAF でアラート再発が無いか継続監視。
Affected packages
References
- advisory github.com
- web docs.saltstack.com
- web docs.saltstack.com