CVE-2024-29834

This vulnerability allows authenticated users with produce or consume permissions to perform unauthorized operations on partitioned topics, such as unloading topics and triggering compaction. These management operations should be restricted to users with the tenant admin role or superuser role. An authenticated user with produce permission can create subscriptions and update subscription properties on partitioned topics, even though this should be limited to users with consume permissions. This impact analysis assumes that Pulsar has been configured with the default authorization provider. For custom authorization providers, the impact could be slightly different. Additionally, the vulnerability allows an authenticated user to read, create, modify, and delete namespace properties in any namespace in any tenant. In Pulsar, namespace properties are reserved for user provided metadata about the namespace.

This issue affects Apache Pulsar versions from 2.7.1 to 2.10.6, from 2.11.0 to 2.11.4, from 3.0.0 to 3.0.3, from 3.1.0 to 3.1.3, and from 3.2.0 to 3.2.1.

3.0 Apache Pulsar users should upgrade to at least 3.0.4. 3.1 and 3.2 Apache Pulsar users should upgrade to at least 3.2.2.

Users operating versions prior to those listed above should upgrade to the aforementioned patched versions or newer versions.

Weakness

The product performs an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action, but it does not correctly perform the check. This allows attackers to bypass intended access restrictions.

Extended Description

Assuming a user with a given identity, authorization is the process of determining whether that user can access a given resource, based on the user’s privileges and any permissions or other access-control specifications that apply to the resource. When access control checks are incorrectly applied, users are able to access data or perform actions that they should not be allowed to perform. This can lead to a wide range of problems, including information exposures, denial of service, and arbitrary code execution.

Potential Mitigations

• Divide the product into anonymous, normal, privileged, and administrative areas. Reduce the attack surface by carefully mapping roles with data and functionality. Use role-based access control (RBAC) [REF-229] to enforce the roles at the appropriate boundaries.
• Note that this approach may not protect against horizontal authorization, i.e., it will not protect a user from attacking others with the same role.
• Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
• For example, consider using authorization frameworks such as the JAAS Authorization Framework [REF-233] and the OWASP ESAPI Access Control feature [REF-45].
• For web applications, make sure that the access control mechanism is enforced correctly at the server side on every page. Users should not be able to access any unauthorized functionality or information by simply requesting direct access to that page.
• One way to do this is to ensure that all pages containing sensitive information are not cached, and that all such pages restrict access to requests that are accompanied by an active and authenticated session token associated with a user who has the required permissions to access that page.

References

• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/04/02/2
• https://lists.apache.org/thread/v0ltl94k9lg28qfr1f54hpkvvsjc5bj5
• https://pulsar.apache.org/security/CVE-2024-29834/