[HBASE-14799] Commons-collections object deserialization remote command execution vulnerability

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Critical
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.94.28, 1.2.0, 1.3.0, 1.0.3, 1.1.3, 0.98.17, 2.0.0
• Component/s: dependencies, security
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed

Release Note

This issue resolves a potential security vulnerability. For all versions we update our commons-collections dependency to the release that fixes the reported vulnerability in that library. In 0.98 we additionally disable by default a feature of code carried from 0.94 for backwards compatibility that is not needed.

• Assignee: Andrew Kyle Purtell
• Reporter: Andrew Kyle Purtell
• Created: 12/Nov/15 02:09
• Updated: 27/Jan/16 15:28
• Resolved: 23/Nov/15 23:49

Description

Read: http://foxglovesecurity.com/2015/11/06/what-do-weblogic-websphere-jboss-jenkins-opennms-and-your-application-have-in-common-this-vulnerability/

TL;DR: If you have commons-collections on your classpath and accept and process Java object serialization data, then you probably have an exploitable remote command execution vulnerability.

0.94 and earlier HBase releases are vulnerable because we might read in and rehydrate serialized Java objects out of RPC packet data in HbaseObjectWritable using ObjectInputStream#readObject (see https://hbase.apache.org/0.94/xref/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/io/HbaseObjectWritable.html#714) and we have commons-collections on the classpath on the server.

0.98 also carries some limited exposure to this problem through inclusion of backwards compatible deserialization code in HbaseObjectWritableFor96Migration. This is used by the 0.94-to-0.98 migration utility, and by the AccessController when reading permissions from the ACL table serialized in legacy format by 0.94. Unprivileged users cannot run the tool nor access the ACL table.

Unprivileged users can however attack a 0.94 installation. An attacker might be able to use the method discussed on that blog post to capture valid HBase RPC payloads for 0.94 and prior versions, rewrite them to embed an exploit, and replay them to trigger a remote command execution with the privileges of the account under which the HBase RegionServer daemon is running.

We need to make a patch release of 0.94 that changes HbaseObjectWritable to disallow processing of random Java object serializations. This will be a compatibility break that might affect old style coprocessors, which quite possibly may rely on this catch-all in HbaseObjectWritable for custom object (de)serialization. We can introduce a new configuration setting, "hbase.allow.legacy.object.serialization", defaulting to false.

To be thorough, we can also use the new configuration setting "hbase.allow.legacy.object.serialization" (defaulting to false) in 0.98 to prevent the AccessController from falling back to the vulnerable legacy code. This turns out to not affect the ability to migrate permissions because TablePermission implements Writable, which is safe, not Serializable.