CVE-2022-33891: Apache Spark Shell Command Injection Vulnerability

by do son · Published July 17, 2022 · Updated July 19, 2022

Apache Spark released the latest security bulletin on July 18, which contains a shell command injection vulnerability (CVE-2022-33891). The severity is important. The security researcher Kostya Kortchinsky (Databricks) has been credited with reporting this flaw.

Spark is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. It provides high-level APIs in Scala, Java, Python, and R, and an optimized engine that supports general computation graphs for data analysis. It also supports a rich set of higher-level tools including Spark SQL for SQL and DataFrames, pandas API on Spark for pandas workloads, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX for graph processing, and Structured Streaming for stream processing.

“The Apache Spark UI offers the possibility to enable ACLs via the configuration option spark.acls.enable. With an authentication filter, this checks whether a user has access permissions to view or modify the application. If ACLs are enabled, a code path in HttpSecurityFilter can allow someone to perform impersonation by providing an arbitrary user name. A malicious user might then be able to reach a permission check function that will ultimately build a Unix shell command based on their input, and execute it. This will result in arbitrary shell command execution as the user Spark is currently running as,” read the security bulletin.

The PoC code exploits is available on GitHub.