Three critical security vulnerabilities have been uncovered in Azure HDInsight’s Apache Hadoop, Kafka, and Spark services, posing risks of privilege escalation and denial-of-service attacks. These vulnerabilities affect authenticated users of Azure HDInsight services such as Apache Ambari and Apache Oozie. One flaw allows XML External Entity (XXE) injection, another permits Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) injection, while the third flaw leads to regular expression denial-of-service (ReDoS) vulnerabilities in Apache Oozie. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities could result in various consequences, including root-level file reading, privilege escalation, and denial-of-service attacks.
The XXE injection vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-36419, arises from a lack of user input validation, enabling attackers to escalate privileges by reading root-level files. Similarly, the JDBC injection flaw, identified as CVE-2023-38156, allows attackers to obtain root-level access by exploiting the lack of validation in Java Database Connectivity. Meanwhile, the ReDoS vulnerability in Apache Oozie is attributed to inadequate input validation and constraint enforcement, leading to a denial-of-service condition by causing intensive loop operations.
Microsoft has responded swiftly to these vulnerabilities, rolling out fixes as part of updates released on October 26, 2023. These updates address the identified flaws and aim to enhance the security of Azure HDInsight services. The discovery of these vulnerabilities underscores the ongoing need for robust cybersecurity measures and proactive patch management to mitigate risks and safeguard critical systems and data.
