We take security issues seriously and welcome responsible disclosure from researchers discovering vulnerabilities in Foreman. Please email foreman-security@googlegroups.com (a private address for the security team) with all reports. If you notice the security issue is related to a particular plugin, please mention the plugin within the body of the email to help us in routing the issue to the most authoritative source.
We will endeavour to resolve high severity issues in the current stable release and lower severity issues in the next major release. Announcements of security issues will be made on foreman-announce when a release containing a fix is available to end users and credit will be given to the researcher if desired.
The policy of the project is to treat all newly reported issues as private, and after evaluation, low to medium severity issues will be made public while high severity issues will be fixed under an embargo. Typically the project supports only one major (x.y) release at a time, though high severity issues may also be fixed in the previous release if it was only recently superseded.
All security advisories made for Foreman are listed below with their corresponding CVE identifier.
When sending a power action to a host provisioned on an oVirt compute resource, the API responded with details of the compute resource, including credentials in clear text.
One of the parameters passed when saving dashboard widget positions was not properly escaped, leading to possibility of SQL injection attack. Due to the nature of the query the impact is limited to possible information disclosure and does not allow modifications to the database.
This issue was reported by Martin Povolný of Red Hat.
Facts reported by hosts that contain HTML code in their fact name or value could cause said HTML to be executed by users’ browser when hovering over fact distribution charts on the facts page, on the statistic page and on the trends page.
This issue was reported by Roman Mueller.
An organization or location named e.g. <script>do_evil();</script> may cause the script to be executed if a user tries to assign selected or all unassigned hosts to said organization or location.
This issue was reported by Sanket Jagtap.
User with *_users permissions who is assigned to some organization(s) can do all operations granted by these permissions on all administrator user objects. We considered admin to effectively be present in all organizations.
The issue was reported by David Caplan.
Compute resource images added/registered in Foreman with username and password credentials will have the password stored in plain text in the audit log. A user with permission to view the audit log can view the password and may gain access to newly provisioned hosts.
This issue was reported by Daniel Kimsey.
HTTPS connections initiated by Hammer CLI to the API server do not perform validation of the server SSL/TLS certificate, allowing for a man-in-the-middle attack against the user.
This issue was reported by Tomas Strachota.
It was found that foreman-debug did not obfuscate sensitive information (such as passwords, answer and configuration options) from the foreman-installer log file, allowing a user authorized to access the archives created by foreman-debug to gain access to potentially sensitive information.
This issue was reported by Pavel Moravec.
If an organization or location is created with a name containing HTML, then the administrator-only Settings page will render the HTML as part of a dropdown menu.
This may permit a stored XSS attack if an organization/location with HTML in the name is created, then an administrator attempts to change the default organization/location settings.
Mitigation: restrict permissions to organization and location creation, use the API or CLI instead to change the default organization/location settings.
Note: this CVE identifier has been assigned retrospectively, to describe a vulnerability that was fixed during a refactoring of the affected code.
This issue was reported by Sanket Jagtap.
When creating an organization or location in Foreman, if the name contains HTML then the second step of the wizard will render the HTML. This occurs in the alert box on the page.
This may permit a stored XSS attack if an organization/location with HTML in the name is created, then a user is linked directly to this URL.
Mitigation: restrict permissions to organization and location creation, don’t follow untrusted links to Foreman.
This issue was reported by Sanket Jagtap.
A user account that is associated to no organizations or locations is able to view resources from all organizations/locations in the web UI or API, when either the organization or location feature is enabled. The user remains subject to permissions and filters on their assigned roles.
Mitigation: ensure all users are assigned to at least one organization or location, or disable the feature if unused.
This issue was reported by Daniel Lobato Garcia.
Lists of associated resources, such as operating systems associated to a new architecture, are not restricted to listing resources that the user is authorized to view, when rendering with fewer than six items. The list will show all possible associated resources, disclosing their names.
This issue was reported by Jitendra Yejare.
Network interface identifiers stored for hosts may contain HTML or JavaScript that allows a stored XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerability when later viewing the host edit form.
This issue was reported by Sanket Jagtap.
Label parameter of all form helpers was not escaped allowing XSS (cross-site scripting). The Foreman itself did not contain exploitable code but other plugins that relied on form helpers could be vulnerable. One known vulnerable plugin is Remote Execution. All versions of this plugin are affected.
Non-admin users with the view_hosts permission containing a filter are able to access API routes beneath “hosts” such as GET /api/v2/hosts/secrethost/interfaces without the filter being taken into account. This allows users to access network interface details (including BMC login details) for any host.
The filter is only correctly used when accessing the main host details (/api/v2/hosts/secrethost). Access to the “nested” routes, which includes interfaces, reports, parameters, audits, facts and Puppet classes, is not authorized beyond requiring any view_hosts permission.
Users who are logged in with permissions to view some hosts are able to preview provisioning templates for any host by specifying its hostname in the URL, as the specific view_hosts permissions and filters aren’t checked.
If the organization or location features are enabled, the user will still be restricted to their associated orgs/locs.
When accessing Foreman as a user limited to specific organization or location, these are not taken into account in the API or parts of the UI. This allows a user to view, edit and delete organizations and locations they are not associated with if they have the requisite permissions.
Mitigation: make sure you have filters restricted to organizations or locations when you limit user by assigning them to particular organizations or locations.
When accessing Foreman as a user limited to specific organization, if users know other organization id and have unlimited filters they can access/modify other organization data. They just have to set the id as API parameter.
Mitigation: make sure you have filters restricted to organizations or locations when you limit user by assigning him particular organization or location.
The smart proxy TFTP API is vulnerable to arbitrary remote code execution, as it passes untrusted user input (the PXE template type) to the eval() function causing it to be executed.
Thanks to Lukas Zapletal for reporting the issue.
Mitigation: ensure trusted_hosts is set in /etc/foreman-proxy/settings.yml, HTTPS is in use and /etc/foreman-proxy/settings.d/tftp.yml is configured for https only (if enabled).
A provisioning template containing inspect will expose sensitive information about the Rails controller and application when rendered when using Safemode rendering (the default setting). This includes the application secret token, possibly permitting a privilege escalation.
Thanks to Ivan Necas for reporting the issue.
As a precaution, the security token may be regenerated with:
chown foreman /usr/share/foreman/config/initializers/local_secret_token.rbforeman-rake security:generate_tokenchown root /usr/share/foreman/config/initializers/local_secret_token.rbMitigation: remove edit_provisioning_templates from untrusted users.
It is possible to run arbitrary Ruby code entering it on the Administer - Settings - Discovery and then visiting a discovered host detail page where it gets rendered.
Bookmarks set to ‘private’ can be viewed by any user, and edited or deleted by any user granted the edit or destroy_bookmarks permissions.
Mitigation: remove edit_bookmarks and destroy_bookmarks from untrusted users, remove private information from bookmark searches.
The popup boxes next to global parameters, smart class parameters and smart variables on the host and host group edit forms can allow stored XSS to be executed in the browser from the parameter description etc.
Mitigation: do not click on the information popup box next to parameters in the host/group forms, and/or remove permission to edit Puppet classes from untrusted users.
The search for facts and also hosts by facts is vulnerable to SQL injection by breaking out of quotes in either the fact name or the fact value.
No CVE identifier will be assigned to this vulnerability as it affects only release candidates.
The parameter management UI has a checkbox to mark values as hidden to mask them from casual viewing. The checkbox that hides/shows the value fails to handle HTML properly and so is vulnerable to an XSS issue where HTML can be stored in a parameter, and executed by another user if they later tick/untick the hide box.
This CVE identifier was assigned before realizing that this was not a bug in Foreman, but a feature of Active Directory. It will remain assigned for future reference only. See the Active Directory password changes section of the manual or Microsoft KB906305 for more details.
When using an Active Directory instance to log into Foreman (via an LDAP authentication source), it is possible to log into Foreman for up to one hour after a password change in AD using the old password.
Users with view_reports or destroy_reports permissions allows a user to view or delete reports from any host without taking their view_hosts permission into account.
The reports list and other views combine the reports and hosts permissions to only show reports for hosts that a user can view, but the individual report show/delete pages and APIs do not apply the hosts permissions.
Mitigation: remove view_reports and destroy_reports permissions from users until a fix is available, or add a search query to the role filter to restrict it.
The “require_ssl” setting in /etc/foreman/settings.yml should enforce that web requests sent to Foreman over HTTP are redirected to HTTPS, but this was found not to happen with API requests (e.g. from Hammer CLI). Foreman will process API requests over HTTP, but should have redirected.
Redirection won’t help with credentials having already been sent, but should give some notification that the user/app is using the wrong URL.
Mitigation: add the following to the Apache HTTP VirtualHost, e.g. in /etc/httpd/conf.d/05-foreman.d/api_request.conf:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/api/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/api/$1 [R,L]
A user with the edit_users permission (e.g. with the Manager role) is allowed to edit admin users. This allows them to change the password of the admin user’s account and gain access to it.
Mitigation: change roles of users with the edit_users permission, remove the Unlimited flag and set a search query of admin = false.
This CVE identifier was assigned before realizing that no released versions of Foreman Discovery were affected. It will remain assigned for future reference only.
The Foreman Discovery plugin auto provisioning rules do not enforce that the rule and the assigned host group are in the same organization and location. This can allow a rule to be configured with mismatched orgs/locations, and for another user who has access to the rule but not the host group, to run it and provision a host into a group in a different org/location to their own.
The session cookie created when accessing the Foreman web UI over HTTPS is not set with the ‘secure’ flag, which may lead to session hijacking.
If a user successfully logs into Foreman, then accesses Foreman over HTTP (which redirects to HTTPS, but with a window of opportunity), the session ID will be sent unencrypted and the session may be hijacked by an attacker.
When a non-admin user is associated to organizations or locations, their access is not correctly restricted. API access allows access to resources in any org/location, and UI access when the user is associated to more than one org/location is not restricted.
This allows users to read, edit and perform actions on resources (e.g. hosts) outside of the organizations or locations they have been assigned to.
When making an SSL connection to an LDAP authentication source in Foreman, the remote server certificate is accepted without any verification against known certificate authorities.
This can allow the LDAP connection between Foreman and the LDAP server to be attacked, and a different LDAP server could be contacted to authenticate users to Foreman.
The smart proxy (foreman-proxy) fails to block connections when no client SSL certificate is supplied, instead permitting any request. Typically the smart proxy is configured to receive HTTPS requests with a client SSL certificate that is signed by the same CA (certificate authority) as its own, preventing unauthorized access to manage services such as DHCP, DNS and the Puppet CA.
It is strongly recommended to mitigate the problem by restricting access to the smart proxy. More information on foreman-announce.
Thanks to Michael Moll, Jon McKenzie and Michael Messmore for reporting the issue.
Provisioning templates can store HTML and then evaluate HTML or JS content when using the editor’s preview function.
Thanks to Aaron Stone for reporting this issue.
The user logout function could be triggered through cross-site request forgery (e.g. a redirect), causing a user to be logged out and lose their active session.
Thanks to Jan Hutař of Red Hat for discovering this issue.
Operating system names and descriptions could store and cause evaluation of HTML in page views, allowing a cross site scripting (XSS) attack against the user.
Thanks to Jan Hutař of Red Hat for discovering this issue.
The host YAML page, used to preview the Foreman response for the Puppet ENC, will evaluate HTML stored in any host data such as parameters or comments, allowing a cross site scripting (XSS) attack against the user.
When resources (e.g. a host group) were saved or deleted through the web UI, the name of the resource would be evaluated unsafely inside the notification popup, allowing a cross site scripting (XSS) attack against the user changing the resource.
Thanks to Adam Salah of the Red Hat Satellite 6 QE Team for discovering this issue.
The Smart Proxy API for downloading boot files from installation media to the TFTP server was vulnerable to remote code execution exploits.
Thanks to Lukas Zapletal of the Red Hat Foreman Team for discovering this issue.
The search auto-completion was vulnerable to a stored cross site scripting (XSS) attack via completion of (global/host) parameters in search keys.
Thanks to Jan Hutař of Red Hat for discovering this issue.
Provisioning templates previews (“spoof”) are accessible without authentication when used with the hostname parameter.
When Kafo (used in the Foreman installer) runs, a /tmp/default_values.yaml file is written to and created with world readable permissions. This is prone to race-condition attacks and contains default values for all parameters, such as autogenerated passwords.
Upon successful login, a new session ID was not generated for the user, so an attacker who had set the session ID in the request from the user’s browser would be able to exploit the escalated session with the user’s privileges.
Thanks to Jeremy Choi and Keqin Hong of the Red Hat HSS Pen-Test Team for discovering this issue.
The 500 error page was vulnerable to stored cross site scripting attacks, where the error message was rendered without HTML encoding. In addition, bookmarks could be saved by any user with HTML in the name which caused an error when rendering the bookmark list, leading to a 500 error and execution of the HTML in the browser.
Thanks to Jeremy Choi and Keqin Hong of the Red Hat HSS Pen-Test Team for discovering this issue.
Host and host group parameter overrides (lookup_values) allowed SQL injection from the host FQDN or host group label.
The /api/hosts API was found to provide access to all hosts without checking whether the current user has privileges to view a particular host.
Thanks to Daniel Lobato Garcia of CERN IT-PES-PS for discovering this issue.
Power and IPMI boot actions converted user input to symbols, which could lead to memory exhaustion.
Thanks to Marek Hulan of the Red Hat Foreman Team for discovering this issue.
Bookmarks could be created in Foreman containing data that was later executed arbitrarily when reading the bookmark.
Thanks to Ramon de C Valle of the Red Hat Product Security Team for discovering this issue.
Non-admin user with permissions to create or edit other users were able to change the admin flag, or assign roles that they themselves do not have, enabling a privilege escalation.
Thanks to Ramon de C Valle of the Red Hat Product Security Team for discovering this issue.
Requests to the smart proxy Puppet run API were not properly escaped when running the Puppet command, leading to possible arbitrary command execution.
XMLHttpRequest or AJAX requests to Foreman were not subject to authorization checks, enabling privilege escalation for authenticated users.
The external node classifier (ENC) API in Foreman was accessible to any remote host and the output would contain the hashed root psasword (used for unattended installation). Authentication and authorization features were added to the ENC API to secure this data.
Thanks to Andreas Rogge for discovering this issue.
The salt used to hash root passwords (used for unattended installation) was fixed to the string “foreman” instead of being randomized.
Fact and report import APIs in Foreman were accessible to any remote host and accepted YAML input, allowing arbitrary objects to be created on the Foreman server via YAML. Authentication and authorization features were added to the import APIs to prevent this.
Input to the search mechanism in Foreman was not escaped when constructing queries, enabling SQL injection into the resulting query.
The smart proxy daemon ran with a umask of 0, causing files and directories written by it to have world-writable bits set. Files managed by the smart proxy could be modified by local users on the same host.
The Foreman project uses multiple GPG keys to sign packages and release artifacts. All stable releases will be signed by one of the keys. Nightly and plugin Debian packages will be signed, while nightly and plugin RPM packages will not (this may change in the future).
Signing for the Debian family of operating systems is via secure apt and more information, including verification steps can be found on the Debian web site. RPMs themselves are signed and can be verified using rpm --checksig PACKAGE. All yum repository configs set up by foreman-release RPMs or the installer will enable GPG checking by default.
Key management is changing at the time of writing to cycle nightly keys every two years, and issue limited duration keys per stable release.
| Key ID | Fingerprint | Description | Created | Expires | Revoked | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| E775FF07 | 1DCB 15D1 2CA1 40EE F494 7E57 66CF 053F E775 FF07 | Foreman Archive Signing Key | 2010-11-10 | 2014-07-08 | Used up to Foreman 1.5.1 | |
| 1AA043B8 | 7059 542D 5AEA 367F 7873 2D02 B348 4CB7 1AA0 43B8 | Foreman Automatic Signing Key (2014) | 2014-07-01 | 2016-06-30 | ||
| 563278F6 | AE0A F310 E2EA 96B6 B6F4 BD72 6F86 00B9 5632 78F6 | Foreman Automatic Signing Key (2016) | 2016-04-08 | 2018-04-08 | ||
| 667D1F07 | 503E FA96 89AA AD57 D693 6514 A91E 2984 667D 1F07 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.6) | 2014-08-14 | 2015-08-14 | ||
| 2D762E88 | 730A 9338 F93E E729 2EAC 2052 4C25 8BD4 2D76 2E88 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.7) | 2014-11-10 | 2016-11-09 | ||
| 225C9B71 | 64E3 7B1F A6C0 2416 6B53 5495 28F5 A69D 225C 9B71 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.8) | 2015-03-09 | 2016-03-08 | ||
| 6E2A21BF | BEA5 E3F6 AF59 7107 0241 4514 E05F 7157 6E2A 21BF | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.9) | 2015-06-26 | 2016-06-25 | ||
| BE67E9DA | 9EFD 673A 649D 77F5 C615 44AC C1B2 621D BE67 E9DA | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.10) | 2015-10-07 | 2016-10-06 | ||
| 3494A06D | 6681 20FA 0528 3FD2 AF60 FC3A 335F 3A45 3494 A06D | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.11) | 2016-02-17 | 2017-02-16 | ||
| 7D492D06 | 860D D70A 378A 84CE 8D47 C10E B507 F6A6 7D49 2D06 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.12) | 2016-05-31 | 2017-05-31 | ||
| 7DFE6FC2 | 84E7 90DF FB1D 2EAE C429 C6CD 4EA2 F7E7 7DFE 6FC2 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.13) | 2016-09-05 | 2017-09-05 | ||
| F06D8950 | AF74 2A91 BF76 6333 E9FF 5EAA BFE5 1511 F06D 8950 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.14) | 2016-12-06 | 2017-12-06 | ||
| 9A8DAAD5 | 6610 7FC8 658F F702 E849 9AC4 17A3 FD24 9A8D AAD5 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.15) | 2017-03-29 | 2018-03-29 | ||
| 5245FE1D | 41EE 8815 A84C ACA4 A583 5055 9C21 BCB2 8977 40E9 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.16) | 2017-09-21 | 2018-09-21 | ||
| 2A8CA27B | B59D DB6C AB83 5E19 14DE 4725 F5F9 54D9 2A8C A27B | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.17) | 2017-11-21 | 2018-11-21 | ||
| 57CEF41F | 6973 3EEC D1AE 1E23 71FA 04EA 4C3D D0B3 57CE F41F | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.18) | 2018-04-10 | 2019-04-10 | ||
| 46020A10694FA479 | CE31 59AA C3EC 09E5 1614 7754 4602 0A10 694F A479 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.19) | 2018-07-17 | 2019-07-17 | ||
| 2EC99767565EA533 | 5C75 B050 DD06 92EB 042B 5C82 2EC9 9767 565E A533 | Foreman Release Signing Key (1.20) | 2018-10-15 | 2019-10-15 |
In July 2014 after a server was compromised, the existing GPG key (0xE775FF07) was revoked and replaced with a new key (0x1AA043B8) as a precaution. All existing packages were re-signed with the new key and thereafter, new major releases are signed with new per-release keys.
All users with the old key trusted are urged to immediately disable this as follows:
sudo apt-key del E775FF07sudo rpm -e gpg-pubkey-e775ff07-4cda3cf9More information is available in the announcement.
Foreman 1.19.0 has been released! Follow the quick start to install it.
Foreman 1.18.2 has been released! Follow the quick start to install it.
Foreman 1.17.4 is now available with important bug fixes. Follow the quick start to install it.