Auth bypass in Red Hat Ansible Tower

CVE-2020-10697

A flaw was found in Ansible Tower when running Openshift. Tower runs a memcached, which is accessed via TCP. An attacker can take advantage of writing a playbook polluting this cache, causing a denial of service attack. This attack would not completely stop the service, but in the worst-case scenario, it can reduce the Tower performance, for which memcached is designed. Theoretically, more sophisticated attacks can be performed by manipulating and crafting the cache, as Tower relies on memcached as a place to pull out setting values. Confidential and sensitive data stored in memcached should not be pulled, as this information is encrypted. This flaw affects Ansible Tower versions before 3.6.4, Ansible Tower versions before 3.5.6 and Ansible Tower versions before 3.4.6.

Vulnerability class: Broken Access Control

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 4.4 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:L.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (13.5th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 14th percentile — 13.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2020-10697: held from 0.002 to 0.002.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.002 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2020-10697?
CVE-2020-10697 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Red Hat Ansible Tower, classified under Missing Authorization. CVSS score: 4.4/10. Published 2021-05-27.
How severe is CVE-2020-10697?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 4.4 out of 10.
Is CVE-2020-10697 known to be exploited?
1 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.