A flaw in the memcached cache plugin of the community.general Ansible collection allows untrusted pickle data to be deserialized on the controller, enabling an attacker to execute arbitrary code. The plugin documentation claims that records are stored in JSON format, but it actually relies on python-memcached, which pickles values on write and unpickles them on read. Because memcached is unauthenticated and cache keys are predictable, a crafted pickle payload can be written to a network-exposed or shared memcached instance and will be executed by the controller when the poisoned fact cache is next read, fulfilling CWE-502.

Red Hat Ceph Storage 5, Red Hat Ceph Storage 9, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17.1, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 18.0 are affected. The vulnerability exists in the memcached cache plugin used by these products when the cache is configured to allow unauthenticated network access. The affected versions are those indicated by the CNA, without further version granularity.

The CVSS score of 8.1 indicates a high impact. The EPSS score is unavailable, so it is unclear how frequently this flaw is exploited. The flaw is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog. The likely attack vector is a network-exposed, unauthenticated memcached instance whose cache keys are predictable; an attacker can inject a crafted pickle payload that will be unpickled by the Ansible controller during a subsequent fact cache read, leading to remote code execution on the controller host.