Medium · published September 24, 2026
A server-side request forgery flaw was found in the Ansible Automation Platform
automation-controller email notification backend. The email backend passes the user-supplied SMTP
host and port from a notification template directly to the SMTP client without validating that
the target is not an internal, loopback, link-local, or reserved address. An authenticated user
with organization notification-admin permission can create or modify an email notification
template pointing at an arbitrary internal address, trigger a test, and have the controller task
process open a raw TCP connection to that address. The resulting connection error is reflected
back through the notification record, providing a three-state internal port-scan oracle (open,
closed, filtered) over the control-plane's cluster network, including the in-cluster Kubernetes
API. When a shared organization template holds a stored SMTP password, redirecting the host can
also cause that credential to be transmitted to an attacker-controlled server.