Signing cookies is an application security feature that adds a digital signature to cookie data to verify its authenticity and integrity. The signature helps prevent malicious actors from modifying the cookie value, which can lead to security vulnerabilities and exploitation. Apache Hive’s service component accidentally exposes the signed cookie to the end user when there is a mismatch in signature between the current and expected cookie. Exposing the correct cookie signature can lead to further exploitation.
The vulnerable CookieSigner logic was introduced in Apache Hive by HIVE-9710 (1.2.0) and in Apache Spark by SPARK-14987 (2.0.0). The affected components are the following:
* org.apache.hive:hive-service
* org.apache.spark:spark-hive-thriftserver_2.11
* org.apache.spark:spark-hive-thriftserver_2.12
In all versions of Apache Spark, its standalone resource manager accepts code to execute on a 'master' host, that then runs that code on 'worker' hosts. The master itself does not, by design, execute user code. A specially-crafted request to the master can, however, cause the master to execute code too. Note that this does not affect standalone clusters with authentication enabled. While the master host typically has less outbound access to other resources than a worker, the execution of code on the master is nevertheless unexpected.