CVE-2020-9480: Apache Spark RCE vulnerability in auth-enabled standalone master

[Sean Owen <srowen () apache org>]

Severity: Important

Vendor: The Apache Software Foundation

Versions Affected:
Apache Spark 2.4.5 and earlier

Description:
In Apache Spark 2.4.5 and earlier, a standalone resource manager's master may
be configured to require authentication (spark.authenticate) via a
shared secret. When enabled, however, a specially-crafted RPC to the
master can succeed in starting an application's resources on the Spark
cluster, even without the shared key. This can be leveraged to execute
shell commands on the host machine.

This does not affect Spark clusters using other resource managers
(YARN, Mesos, etc).


Mitigation:
Users should update to Spark 2.4.6 or 3.0.0.
Where possible, network access to the cluster machines should be
restricted to trusted hosts only.

Credit:
Ayoub Elaassal

References:
https://spark.apache.org/security.html