From version 1.3.0 onward, Apache Spark's standalone master exposes a REST API for job submission, in addition to the submission mechanism used by spark-submit. In standalone, the config property 'spark.authenticate.secret' establishes a shared secret for authenticating requests to submit jobs via spark-submit. However, the REST API does not use this or any other authentication mechanism, and this is not adequately documented. In this case, a user would be able to run a driver program without authenticating, but not launch executors, using the REST API. This REST API is also used by Mesos, when set up to run in cluster mode (i.e., when also running MesosClusterDispatcher), for job submission. Future versions of Spark will improve documentation on these points, and prohibit setting 'spark.authenticate.secret' when running the REST APIs, to make this clear. Future versions will also disable the REST API by default in the standalone master by changing the default value of 'spark.master.rest.enabled' to 'false'.
In Apache Spark 1.0.0 to 2.1.2, 2.2.0 to 2.2.1, and 2.3.0, when using PySpark or SparkR, it's possible for a different local user to connect to the Spark application and impersonate the user running the Spark application.
In Apache Spark 2.1.0 to 2.1.2, 2.2.0 to 2.2.1, and 2.3.0, it's possible for a malicious user to construct a URL pointing to a Spark cluster's UI's job and stage info pages, and if a user can be tricked into accessing the URL, can be used to cause script to execute and expose information from the user's view of the Spark UI. While some browsers like recent versions of Chrome and Safari are able to block this type of attack, current versions of Firefox (and possibly others) do not.