CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-1733 — Redhat Ansible security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5

A race condition flaw was found in Ansible Engine 2.7.17 and prior, 2.8.9 and prior, 2.9.6 and prior when running a playbook with an unprivileged become user. When Ansible needs to run a module with become user, the temporary directory is created in /var/tmp. This directory is created with "umask 77 && mkdir -p <dir>"; this operation does not fail if the directory already exists and is owned by another user. An attacker could take advantage to gain control of the become user as the target directory can be retrieved by iterating '/proc/<pid>/cmdline'.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5 (3.1)
Published
2020-03-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-377, CWE-362

Affected products

  • redhat / ansible
  • redhat / ansible_tower
  • redhat / cloudforms_management_engine / 5.0
  • redhat / openstack / 13
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 30
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 31

Showing 6 representative product identities from 14 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Path traversal, unsafe upload, and file handling

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

Check exposure

  • Trace untrusted filenames, archive entries, URLs, and path segments into read, write, include, extraction, and upload operations.
  • Identify filesystem roots, mount permissions, symbolic-link behavior, archive handling, and whether uploaded content is web-accessible or executable.
  • Review canonicalization and containment checks across supported operating systems and storage backends.

Remediate safely

  • Generate server-side storage identifiers and resolve paths beneath a fixed root using filesystem-aware containment checks.
  • Reject absolute, parent-relative, alternate-separator, device, link, and archive entries that escape the intended root.
  • Store uploads outside executable or served paths, validate type and size, and use private atomic temporary files.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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