CVE-2021-43837

HIGH8.4EPSS 7.5%

vault-cli contains possible RCE when reading user-defined data

Published: 12/16/2021Modified: 3/13/2026

Description

### Impact _What kind of vulnerability is it? Who is impacted?_ vault-cli features the ability for rendering templated values (as explained in the [documentation](https://github.com/peopledoc/vault-cli/blob/2.2.1/docs/howto/templated_secrets.rst)). When a secret starts with the prefix `!template!`, vault-cli interprets the rest of the contents of the secret as a Jinja2 template. Jinja2 is a powerful templating engine and it's not designed to safely render arbitrary templates. An attacker controlling a jinja2 template rendered on a machine can trigger arbitrary code, making this a Remote Code Execution (RCE) risk. If the content of the vault can be completely trusted, then this is not a problem. Otherwise, if your threat model includes cases where an attacker can manipulate a secret value read from the vault using vault-cli, then this vulnerability may impact you. This does not impact `vault` itself, except for the fact that the attacker, having an RCE on the machine that executes `vault-cli`, may abuse the token that `vault-cli` uses, to read, write or delete other data from the vault. ### Patches _Has the problem been patched? What versions should users upgrade to?_ In 3.0.0, the code related to interpreting vault templated secrets has been removed entirely. ### Workarounds _Is there a way for users to fix or remediate the vulnerability without upgrading?_ Using the environment variable `VAULT_CLI_RENDER=false` or the flag `--no-render` (placed between `vault-cli` and the subcommand, e.g. `vault-cli --no-render get-all`) or adding `render: false` to the vault-cli configuration yaml file disables rendering and removes the vulnerability. Using the python library, you can use: `vault_cli.get_client(render=False)` when creating your client to get a client that will not render templated secrets and thus operates securely. ### References _Are there any links users can visit to find out more?_ Here's an article explaining how jinja2 templates might be exploited to have side effects: https://podalirius.net/en/publications/grehack-2021-optimizing-ssti-payloads-for-jinja2/ ### For more information If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: * Open an issue in [the vault-cli repo](https://github.com/peopledoc/vault-cli/issues/new)

Affected packages (2)

CVSS scores

SourceVersionSeverityVector
osvCVSS 4.0—CVSS:4.0/AV:A/AC:L/AT:N/PR:H/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H
osvCVSS 3.1HIGH8.4CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

References (9)