MITRE Caldera RCE vulnerability with public PoC fixed, patch ASAP! (CVE-2025–27364)

February 28, 2025

Users of the MITRE Caldera cyber security platform have been urged to plug a critical hole (CVE-2025–27364) that may allow unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution.

CVE-2025–27364

About MITRE Caldera

MITRE Caldera is a platform built on the MITRE ATT&CK framework and is used by cybersecurity teams for adversary emulation, to evaluate detections and defensive tools, train red and blue teamers, testing cyber ranges, and so on.

It consists of a core system (including a command-and-control server with a REST API and a web interface) and plugins (agents, collections of TTPs, etc.) to expand its capabilities. Some of the plugins are maintaned by the Caldera team and are included by default, while others are maintained by third parties and have to be additionally installed by users.

MITRE Caldera can be installed on Linux or macOS machines and require Python 3.9+, GoLang 1.17+, and the NodeJS JavaScript runtime environment to be installed for all of it to function as it should.

About CVE-2025–27364

CVE-2025–27364 is an OS command injection vulnerability affecting all versions of MITRE Caldera up until 4.2.0 and 5.0.0. The vulnerability was discovered and reported by Dawid Kulikowski, a contributor to the project, who also helped create the patch for it.

“The vulnerability originates in the dynamic compilation functionality of the Caldera Manx and Sandcat agents (implants),” the Caldera team explained.

The vulnerability allows remote unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on the server that Caldera is running on, by sending a specially crafted HTTPS request to the Caldera server API used for compiling and downloading the two aforementioned agents.

Several conditions have to be present for a successful attack: the system running the Caldera server also has to have Go(Lang), Python and GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) installed. But, as the team noted, “all of these dependencies are required for Caldera to be fully-functional in the first place and on many distributions, GCC is a dependency of Go, meaning this vulnerability is extremely likely to be available to an attacker.”

The team also published proof-of-exploit (PoC) code, though it made a slight change to prevent it being used as-is by script kiddies. Still, more experienced exploit writers will be able to tweak it by analyzing Caldera’s source code.

CVE-2025–27364 has been fixed in Caldera v5.1.0. Kulikowski will be releasing a Metasploit module for the flaw in the coming weeks, so the team recommends that users update their instances quickly and/or make them inaccessible from the internet.