Deserialization of untrusted data in IPC and Parquet readers in PyArrow versions 0.14.0 to 14.0.0 allows arbitrary code execution. An application is vulnerable if it reads Arrow IPC, Feather or Parquet data from untrusted sources (for example user-supplied input files).
This vulnerability only affects PyArrow, not other Apache Arrow implementations or bindings.
It is recommended that users of PyArrow upgrade to 14.0.1. Similarly, it is recommended that downstream libraries upgrade their dependency requirements to PyArrow 14.0.1 or later. PyPI packages are already available, and we hope that conda-forge packages will be available soon.
If it is not possible to upgrade, we provide a separate package pyarrow-hotfix that disables the vulnerability on older PyArrow versions. See https://pypi.org/project/pyarrow-hotfix/ for instructions.
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pyarrow | Apache | 0.14.0 (including) | 14.0.0 (including) |
It is often convenient to serialize objects for communication or to save them for later use. However, deserialized data or code can often be modified without using the provided accessor functions if it does not use cryptography to protect itself. Furthermore, any cryptography would still be client-side security – which is a dangerous security assumption. Data that is untrusted can not be trusted to be well-formed. When developers place no restrictions on “gadget chains,” or series of instances and method invocations that can self-execute during the deserialization process (i.e., before the object is returned to the caller), it is sometimes possible for attackers to leverage them to perform unauthorized actions, like generating a shell.