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:
The product generates an error message that includes sensitive information about its environment, users, or associated data.
The sensitive information may be valuable information on its own (such as a password), or it may be useful for launching other, more serious attacks. The error message may be created in different ways:
An attacker may use the contents of error messages to help launch another, more focused attack. For example, an attempt to exploit a path traversal weakness (CWE-22) might yield the full pathname of the installed application. In turn, this could be used to select the proper number of “..” sequences to navigate to the targeted file. An attack using SQL injection (CWE-89) might not initially succeed, but an error message could reveal the malformed query, which would expose query logic and possibly even passwords or other sensitive information used within the query.