Salt 0.17.1 Release Notes

release:2013-10-17

Note

THIS RELEASE IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH PREVIOUS VERSIONS. If you update your master to 0.17.1, you must update your minions as well. Sorry for the inconvenience -- this is a result of one of the security fixes listed below.

The 0.17.1 release comes with a number of improvements to salt-ssh, many bugfixes, and a number of security updates.

Salt SSH has been improved to be faster, more featureful and more secure. Since the original release of Salt SSH was primarily a proof of concept, it has been very exciting to see its rapid adoption. We appreciate the willingness of security experts to review Salt SSH and help discover oversights and ensure that security issues only exist for such a tiny window of time.

SSH Enhancements

Shell Improvements

Improvements to Salt SSH's communication have been added that improve routine execution regardless of the target system's login shell.

Performance

Deployment of routines is now faster and takes fewer commands to execute.

Security Updates

Be advised that these security issues all apply to a small subset of Salt users and mostly apply to Salt SSH.

Insufficient Argument Validation

This issue allowed for a user with limited privileges to embed executions inside of routines to execute routines that should be restricted. This applies to users using external auth or client ACL and opening up specific routines.

Be advised that these patches address the direct issue. Additional commits have been applied to help mitigate this issue from resurfacing.

CVE

CVE-2013-4435

MITM SSH attack in salt-ssh

SSH host keys were being accepted by default and not enforced on future SSH connections. These patches set SSH host key checking by default and can be overridden by passing the -i flag to salt-ssh.

CVE

CVE-2013-4436

Affected Versions

0.17.0

Found By

Michael Scherer, Red Hat

YAML Calling Unsafe Loading Routine

It has been argued that this is not a valid security issue, as the YAML loading that was happening was only being called after an initial gateway filter in Salt has already safely loaded the YAML and would fail if non-safe routines were embedded. Nonetheless, the CVE was filed and patches applied.

CVE

CVE-2013-4438

Failure to Drop Supplementary Group on Salt Master

If a salt master was started as a non-root user by the root user, root's groups would still be applied to the running process. This fix changes the process to have only the groups of the running user.

CVE

CVE not considered necessary by submitter.

Affected Versions

0.11.0 - 0.17.0

Found By

Michael Scherer, Red Hat

Failure to Validate Minions Posting Data

This issue allowed a minion to pose as another authorized minion when posting data such as the mine data. All minions now pass through the id challenge before posting such data.

CVE

CVE-2013-4439

Affected Versions

0.15.0 - 0.17.0

Fix Reference

Version 0.17.1 is the first bugfix release for 0.17.0. The changes include:

  • Fix symbolic links in thin.tgz (issue 7482)
  • Pass env through to file.patch state (issue 7452)
  • Service provider fixes and reporting improvements (issue 7361)
  • Add --priv option for specifying salt-ssh private key
  • Fix salt-thin's salt-call on setuptools installations (issue 7516)
  • Fix salt-ssh to support passwords with spaces (issue 7480)
  • Fix regression in wildcard includes (issue 7455)
  • Fix salt-call outputter regression (issue 7456)
  • Fix custom returner support for startup states (issue 7540)
  • Fix value handling in augeas (issue 7605)
  • Fix regression in apt (issue 7624)
  • Fix minion ID guessing to use socket.getfqdn() first (issue 7558)
  • Add minion ID caching (issue 7558)
  • Fix salt-key race condition (issue 7304)
  • Add --include-all flag to salt-key (issue 7399)
  • Fix custom grains in pillar (part of issue 5716, issue 6083)
  • Fix race condition in salt-key (issue 7304)
  • Fix regression in minion ID guessing, prioritize socket.getfqdn() (issue 7558)
  • Cache minion ID on first guess (issue 7558)
  • Allow trailing slash in file.directory state
  • Fix reporting of file_roots in pillar return (issue 5449 and issue 5951)
  • Remove pillar matching for mine.get (issue 7197)
  • Sanitize args for multiple execution modules
  • Fix yumpkg mod_repo functions to filter hidden args (issue 7656)
  • Fix conflicting IDs in state includes (issue 7526)
  • Fix mysql_grants.absent string formatting issue (issue 7827)
  • Fix postgres.version so it won't return None (issue 7695)
  • Fix for trailing slashes in mount.mounted state
  • Fix rogue AttributErrors in the outputter system (issue 7845)
  • Fix for incorrect ssh key encodings resulting in incorrect key added (issue 7718)
  • Fix for pillar/grains naming regression in python renderer (issue 7693)
  • Fix args/kwargs handling in the scheduler (issue 7422)
  • Fix logfile handling for file://, tcp://, and udp:// (issue 7754)
  • Fix error handling in config file parsing (issue 6714)
  • Fix RVM using sudo when running as non-root user (issue 2193)
  • Fix client ACL and underlying logging bugs (issue 7706)
  • Fix scheduler bug with returner (issue 7367)
  • Fix user management bug related to default groups (issue 7690)
  • Fix various salt-ssh bugs (issue 7528)
  • Many various documentation fixes

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