CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-22004 — An issue was discovered in SaltStack Salt before 3003.3

Medium CVSS 6.4

An issue was discovered in SaltStack Salt before 3003.3. The salt minion installer will accept and use a minion config file at C:\salt\conf if that file is in place before the installer is run. This allows for a malicious actor to subvert the proper behaviour of the given minion software.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.4 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-08
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-362

Affected products

  • saltstack / salt
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 33
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 34
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 35

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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

Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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