Auth bypass in Puppet Enterprise

CVE-2012-5158

Puppet Enterprise (PE) before 2.6.1 does not properly invalidate sessions when the session secret has changed, which allows remote authenticated users to retain access via unspecified vectors.

Vulnerability class: Broken Authentication

Published 2014-03-14 · last modified 2026-06-16.

CVSS v2 metric

CVSS v2 base score 4.0 (Medium). Vector: AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:P/A:N. This CVE predates CVSS v3 and has no v3 score from NVD.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.008 (55.3th percentile), scored 2026-09-29.

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 55th percentile — 55.3% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.008 · newest: 0.008 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Puppet Enterprise — versions 2.0.0, 2.5.1, 2.5.2
Puppetlabs Puppet — versions 2.5.0

Weakness classification (CWE)

CWE-287 — Improper Authentication

References

puppetlabs.com/security/cve/cve-2012-5158 (Vendor Advisory)