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Fencer Intel
critical 9.8

CVE-2014-4678 json

Ansible Code Injection Vulnerability

published 6y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-66c7-5pwv-mm3j , PYSEC-2020-203 , EUVD-2020-0015

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
5.3%
EPSS 5.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 92%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The safe_eval function in Ansible before 1.6.4 does not properly restrict the code subset, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via crafted instructions. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2014-4657.

Patch / fix

  • pypi ansible 1.6.4
  • redhat ansible 1.6.4
  • ansible Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1.6.6+dfsg-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2014-4678

  • ansible Ubuntu Pro 14.04 LTS 1.5.4+dfsg-1ubuntu0.1~esm2

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2014-4678

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Is CVE-2014-4678 in your dependencies? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2014-4678 updated cvss 9.8

ansible: safe_eval function does not properly restrict the code subset leads to arbitrary code execution via crafted instructions

  • Red Hat CloudForms Management Engine 5 ansible Red Hat Ansible Engine 2 ansible, ansible-test Red Hat Ansible Tower 3 ansible Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 ansible Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 ansible Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 (Newton) ansible
    +2 more products
    Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 (Queens) ansible Red Hat Storage 3 ansible
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

5.34% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 92% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.5 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
GitHub 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
pypi ansible
<1.6.4
1.6.4

Affected products

  • n/a Ansible

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-74 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements in Output Used by a Downstream Component

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.