CVE-2020-10697: 
Ansible Tower vulnerability analysis and mitigation

A flaw was found in Ansible Tower when running Openshift. Tower runs a memcached instance, which is accessed via TCP. The vulnerability affects Ansible Tower versions before 3.6.4, 3.5.6, and 3.4.6. The issue was discovered and reported by Ryan Petrello and Shane McDonald from Red Hat (CVE Mitre, Red Hat Bugzilla).

The vulnerability stems from the insecure deployment of memcached in Ansible Tower's OpenShift environment. The memcached instance is accessed via TCP on a domain socket that is shared amongst containers on OpenShift, making the deployment inherently insecure. This configuration creates potential security risks in the OpenShift environment (CVE Mitre).

An attacker can potentially write a playbook that pollutes the cache, leading to a denial of service attack. While this wouldn't completely stop the service, it could significantly reduce Tower's performance. Additionally, more sophisticated attacks could be performed by manipulating and crafting the cache, as Tower relies on memcached for setting values. However, confidential and sensitive data stored in memcached should remain secure as this information is encrypted (CVE Mitre).

The vulnerability has been addressed in Ansible Tower versions 3.6.4, 3.5.6, and 3.4.6. Users running affected versions should upgrade to these patched versions or later. According to the Red Hat Bugzilla report, there were no temporary mitigations available for this issue before the patch (Red Hat Bugzilla).