CVE-2025-12978

Fluent Bit is a fast and lightweight logs, metrics, and traces processor for Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows. From 0.11.0 until 5.0.8, plugins/out_forward/forward.c secure_forward_pong copies the server-controlled PONG[2] reason into the 32-byte stack buffer msg with memcpy without checking its MessagePack type or length. An attacker who controls or can impersonate an out_forward Secure Forward destination configured with Shared_Key or Empty_Shared_Key can send an oversized reason during the first handshake and overwrite stack control data. Protected builds reliably terminate, while builds without a stack canary or with a disclosure can allow remote code execution as the Fluent Bit process user. When the opt-in --supervisor mode is used, fork-only respawns preserve the canary and address layout, allowing repeated crash-or-survive probes to support code execution on a hardened build; ordinary exec-based or service-manager restarts do not preserve that state. This issue is fixed in version 5.0.8.

Fluent Bit input plugins (in_http, in_splunk, in_elasticsearch) fail to sanitize tag_key inputs. An attacker with network access or the ability to write records into Splunk or Elasticsearch can supply tag_key values containing special characters like newlines or ../ that are treated as valid tags.

Fluent Bit out_file plugin does not properly sanitize tag values when deriving output file names. When the File option is omitted, the plugin uses untrusted tag input to construct file paths. This allows attackers with network access to craft tags containing path traversal sequences that cause Fluent Bit to write files outside the intended output directory.

The in_forward input plugin in Fluent Bit does not properly enforce the security.users authentication mechanism under certain configuration conditions. Remote attackers with network access to the Fluent Bit instance exposing the forward input can send unauthenticated data.