[release-4.20] OCPBUGS-99887: Cherry-pick CVE-2026-66138 fix (NTP command injection)

[mariocr73]

Cherry-picks upstream security fix d4926bf ("security: fix NTP command handling", CVE-2026-66138) onto the OCP 4.20 branch.

The value of the ntp_server config option was passed unsanitized into a shell command (chronyd -q '<query>', shell=True) in sync_clock(), allowing arbitrary root command execution at early IPA boot. This patch adds input validation and removes shell=True in favor of shlex.quote().

Upstream: https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/ironic-python-agent/+/998486
OSSA: https://security.openstack.org/ossa/OSSA-2026-027.html

Related: OCPBUGS-99887

[openshift-ci-robot]

@mariocr73: This pull request references Jira Issue OCPBUGS-99887, which is invalid:

• expected dependent Jira Issue OCPBUGS-100051 to be in one of the following states: VERIFIED, RELEASE PENDING, CLOSED (ERRATA), CLOSED (CURRENT RELEASE), CLOSED (DONE), CLOSED (DONE-ERRATA), but it is New instead

Comment /jira refresh to re-evaluate validity if changes to the Jira bug are made, or edit the title of this pull request to link to a different bug.

The bug has been updated to refer to the pull request using the external bug tracker.

Details

In response to this:

Cherry-picks upstream security fix d4926bf ("security: fix NTP command handling", CVE-2026-66138) onto the OCP 4.20 branch.

The value of the ntp_server config option was passed unsanitized into a shell command (chronyd -q '<query>', shell=True) in sync_clock(), allowing arbitrary root command execution at early IPA boot. This patch adds input validation and removes shell=True in favor of shlex.quote().

Upstream: https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/ironic-python-agent/+/998486
OSSA: https://security.openstack.org/ossa/OSSA-2026-027.html

Related: OCPBUGS-99887

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[openshift-ci]

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[openshift-ci]

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