Security Automation with Ansible 2

Ansible controller machine security

The controller machine for Ansible requires SSH and Python to be installed and configured. Ansible has a very low attack surface. In January 2017, multiple security issues were found by a company called Computest.

Read more about what they found at https://www.computest.nl/advisories/CT-2017-0109_Ansible.txt. This vulnerability was dubbed owning the farm, since compromising the controller would imply that all the nodes could potentially be compromised.

The controller machine should be a hardened server and treated with all the seriousness that it deserves. In the vulnerability that was disclosed, if a node gets compromised attackers could leverage that to attack and gain access to the controller. Once ...