critical

CVE-2021-43837

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

Published 16 Dec 2021Modified 17 Jun 2026CWE 74, 94

In the Trivy database since at least 24 Oct 2026, 07:11 UTCWhen it arrived before that build is not recorded.

Severity by source

NVD9.1CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

GHSA6.3CVSS:4.0/AV:A/AC:L/AT:N/PR:H/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H

Trivy's own label is CRITICAL. Rated critical by NVD. Rated lower by GHSA (medium).

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.

Affected packages and fixed versions

Source	Package	Fixed in
pip::GitHub Security Advisory pip	vault-cli	3.0.0

References

All 9 references

https://podalirius.net/en/publications/grehack-2021-optimizing-ssti-payloads-for-jinja2/

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