Critical Salt Vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Exposed

Severity: Medium (Score: 57.9)

Sources: Linuxsecurity, Ubuntu

Summary

On April 7, 2026, Ubuntu announced critical vulnerabilities in the Salt infrastructure management tool affecting Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Discovered by Zach Malone and Dylan Frese, these vulnerabilities include improper permission handling for cached data (CVE-2015-8034), allowing local attackers to access sensitive information, and an authentication bypass through PAM service misconfiguration (CVE-2016-3176). The vulnerabilities could lead to significant security breaches if exploited. Users are advised to update their systems to the latest package versions to mitigate these risks. The affected packages include salt-common, salt-master, and salt-minion, all requiring updates available through Ubuntu Pro. The vulnerabilities were published in 2017, but their exploitation potential remains relevant today. A standard system update is recommended to address these issues. Key Points: • Two critical vulnerabilities in Salt affect Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. • CVE-2015-8034 allows local attackers to access sensitive data. • CVE-2016-3176 enables authentication bypass via PAM service misconfiguration.

Key Entities

• Data Breach (attack_type)
• CVE-2015-8034 (cve)
• CVE-2016-3176 (cve)
• Salt (tool)
• Salt-common (platform)
• Salt-master (platform)
• Salt-minion (platform)
• Ubuntu (company)