CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-15869 — Hashicorp Packer security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.3

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer who does not specify the --owners flag when describing images via AWS CLI, and therefore not properly validating source software per AWS recommended security best practices, may unintentionally load an undesired and potentially malicious Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the uncurated public community AMI catalog.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.0)
Published
2018-08-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-732

Affected products

  • hashicorp / packer

Matched remediation archetype

Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
  • Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
  • Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
  • Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
  • Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.