CVE-2020-1740: Debian Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 4.7. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

A flaw was found in Ansible Engine when using Ansible Vault for editing encrypted files. When a user executes "ansible-vault edit", another user on the same computer can read the old and new secret, as it is created in a temporary file with mkstemp and the returned file descriptor is closed and the method write_data is called to write the existing secret in the file. This method will delete the file before recreating it insecurely. All versions in 2.7.x, 2.8.x and 2.9.x branches are believed to be vulnerable.

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 8.0 only; version 10.0 only
• Fedoraproject Fedora: version 30 only; version 31 only; version 32 only
• Red Hat Ansible: before 2.7.17 (fixed in 2.7.17); from 2.8.0, before 2.8.11 (fixed in 2.8.11); from 2.9.0, before 2.9.7 (fixed in 2.9.7)
• Red Hat Ansible Tower: up to and including 3.3.4; from 3.3.5, up to and including 3.4.5; from 3.5.0, up to and including 3.5.5; from 3.6.0, up to and including 3.6.3
• Red Hat Cloudforms Management Engine: version 5.0 only
• Red Hat Openstack: version 13 only

Published 2020-03-16. Last modified 2026-06-17.