Critical flaws in the popular Hadoop management platform leave systems open to remote code execution and data breaches.
Recently, the Apache Software Foundation has announced the discovery of three significant security vulnerabilities impacting Apache Ambari, a widely used platform for managing Hadoop clusters. These vulnerabilities, ranging from moderate to important severity, could allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and execute malicious code on vulnerable systems.
The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-23195, CVE-2025-23196, and CVE-2024-51941, affect various Ambari versions and components.
- CVE-2025-23195 is an XML External Entity (XXE) vulnerability residing in the Ambari/Oozie integration. Attackers could exploit this flaw to read arbitrary files on the server, potentially exposing sensitive configuration data or user information. Additionally, successful exploitation could enable Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attacks, allowing attackers to interact with internal services and further compromise the system.
- CVE-2025-23196 and CVE-2024-51941 are both code injection vulnerabilities, found in the Ambari Alert Definition feature and the Ambari Metrics and AMS Alerts feature, respectively. These vulnerabilities are particularly dangerous as they allow authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary shell commands on the server. This could lead to complete system takeover, data exfiltration, and disruption of critical services.
The Apache Software Foundation has addressed these vulnerabilities in the latest Ambari releases. Users are strongly urged to update their Ambari deployments to version 2.7.9 or later to mitigate these threats.
