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Case File

CVE-2021-43837

HIGH · CVSS 8.4 EPSS 5.00% Public Exploit

Source: NVD + CISA KEV + EPSS (historical backfill) · Published 2021-12-16 · Last synced 2026-08-04

CyberRota Analysis

This is a high severity vulnerability with a CVSS score of 8.4. Public exploit code or proof-of-concept references have been detected in its references. It may be remotely exploitable.

Public Exploit Signal

A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.

Detected Signals
remote code execution code execution

Note: these links are listed for security research and verification purposes only.

CVE
CVE-2021-43837
Severity
HIGH
CVSS
8.4
EPSS
5.00%

Original NVD Description

vault-cli is a configurable command-line interface tool (and python library) to interact with Hashicorp Vault. In versions before 3.0.0 vault-cli features the ability for rendering templated values. 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 is 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. In 3.0.0, the code related to interpreting vault templated secrets has been removed entirely. Users are advised to upgrade as soon as possible. For users unable to upgrade a workaround does exist. 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.