A security flaw was found in Ansible Engine, all Ansible 2.7.x versions prior to 2.7.17, all Ansible 2.8.x versions prior to 2.8.11 and all Ansible 2.9.x versions prior to 2.9.7, when managing kubernetes using the k8s module. Sensitive parameters such as passwords and tokens are passed to kubectl from the command line, not using an environment variable or an input configuration file. This will disclose passwords and tokens from process list and nolog directive from debug module would not have any effect making these secrets being disclosed on stdout and log files.

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 writedata is called to write the existing secret in the file. This method will delete the file before recreating it insecurely.

A flaw was found in the Ansible Engine when the fetch module is used. An attacker could intercept the module, inject a new path, and then choose a new destination path on the controller node. All versions in 2.7.x, 2.8.x and 2.9.x branches are believed to be vulnerable.

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'.