CVE-2021-41090Medium· 6.5▾ Sunlit

Instance config inline secret exposure in Grafana

▾ Sunlit zone — Low / medium · no exploitation signal

Depth score36/ 100 · Low

impact 35.8 · likelihood 0.1 · exploitation 0

⚡ Agent-ready:Raw markdown ↗JSON ↗

Proof of concept

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Published

Dec 8, 2021

Updated

Jul 8, 2026

CVSS

6.5

Vendor

grafana

Product

github.com/grafana/agent

CWE

—

Depth score

36 · Low

EPSS

0.74% · p52

Platforms

—

Source

OSV

Vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N

EPSS history

Exploit-prediction probability, daily snapshots since Jul 9.

0.7% → 0.7%

Timeline

Disclosure to exploitation, from the record and what we observed since indexing it.

3 events · 1674 days

Dec 8, 2021Published
Disclosed via OSV
Jul 8, 2026Record revised
Last analysed / modified upstream
Jul 9, 2026EPSS first tracked
0.7%

grafana #osv #go

Affected

github.com/grafana/agent >= 0.14.0, < 0.21.2

Patched in

github.com/grafana/agent 0.21.2

Full technical detail▾

Overview

Impact

Some inline secrets are exposed in plaintext over the Grafana Agent HTTP server:

Inline secrets for metrics instance configs in the base YAML file are exposed at /-/config
Inline secrets for integrations are exposed at /-/config
Inline secrets for Consul ACL tokens and ETCD basic auth when configured for the scraping service at /-/config.
Inline secrets for the Kafka receiver for OpenTelemetry-Collector tracing at /-/config.
Inline secrets for metrics instance configs loaded from the scraping service are exposed at /agent/api/v1/configs/{name}.

Inline secrets will be exposed to anyone being able to reach these endpoints.

Secrets found in these sections are used for:

Delivering metrics to a Prometheus Remote Write system
Authenticating against a system for discovering Prometheus targets
Authenticating against a system for collecting metrics (scrape_configs and integrations)
Authenticating against a Consul or ETCD for storing configurations to distribute in scraping service mode
Authenticating against Kafka for receiving traces

Non-inlined secrets, such as *_file-based secrets, are not impacted by this vulnerability.

Patches

Download v0.20.1 or any version past v0.21.2 to patch Grafana Agent. These patches obfuscate the listed impacted secrets from the vulnerable endpoints.

The patches also disable the endpoints by default. Pass the command-line flag --config.enable-read-api to opt-in and re-enable the endpoints.

Workarounds

If for some reason you cannot upgrade, use non-inline secrets where possible. Not all configuration options may have a non-inline equivalent.

You also may desire to restrict API access to Grafana Agent, with some combination of:

Restrict network interfaces Grafana Agent listens on through http_listen_address in the server block. 127.0.0.1 is the most restrictive, 0.0.0.0 is the default.
Configure Grafana Agent to use HTTPS with client authentication.
Use firewall rules to restrict external access to Grafana Agent's API.

Affected packages

github.com/grafana/agent >= 0.14.0, < 0.21.2

Remediation

Upgrade to a patched release:

github.com/grafana/agent 0.21.2

References

Related vulnerabilities

Connected by shared product, vendor, weakness, or advisory.

#osv#go

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