Preface: Ansible Automation Platform is a broader enterprise automation platform designed to manage and automate various IT operations, including infrastructure, cloud, networking, and security. While it can be used for automating web server deployments and configurations. Besides, web hosting service providers can and often do use the Ansible Automation Platform for automating various tasks related to web hosting and infrastructure management.

Background: In Ansible, Jinja2 templating is widely used to dynamically render variables, expressions, and logic in playbooks, templates, and even hooks (like webhooks or event triggers in EDA).

You can use Jinja2 in:

•       Playbooks: For dynamic task names, conditions, and variables.

•       Templates: To generate configuration files.

•       Hooks or Webhooks: Especially in EDA, where incoming payloads can be parsed and matched using Jinja2 expressions.

When a POST request is sent to http[:][//]<EDA_HOST>[:]5000/alert with the payload:

•       The EDA controller receives the event.

•       It evaluates the condition using Jinja2.

•       If matched, it runs the playbook respond_to_critical_alert[.]yml.

Vulnerability details: A flaw was found in the EDA component of the Ansible Automation Platform, where user-supplied Git branch or refspec values are evaluated as Jinja2 templates. This vulnerability allows authenticated users to inject expressions that execute commands or access sensitive files on the EDA worker. In OpenShift, it can lead to service account token theft.

Official announcement: Please refer to the link for details – https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-49521