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