Puppet Labs has blasted out a security advisory about a vulnerability in the popular infrastructure management tool Puppet.

The CVE-2013-3567 (Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution Vulnerability) warning was issued by Puppet Labs on Tuesday, and advises all Puppet users to upgrade to versions 2.7.22, 3.2.2 or later, and paid-for customers of Puppet Enterprise to move to 2.8.2.

The vulnerability is serious as it allows for code to be executed remotely.

"When making REST api calls, the puppet master takes YAML from an untrusted client, deserializes it, and then calls methods on the resulting object. A YAML payload can be crafted to cause the deserialization to construct an instance of any class available in the ruby process, which allows an attacker to execute code contained in the payload," the company wrote.

Puppet is an open source configuration management and automation tool, and its development is stewarded by Puppet Labs, which makes the commercial version, Puppet Enterprise. VMware was the sole investor in the company's $30 million fourth funding round in January.

One alternative to Puppet is Chef, which is made by Opscode. Chef has been backed heavily by Amazon Web Services and sits inside the company's OpsWorks control layer. ®