Details
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Bug
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Status: Closed
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Major
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Resolution: Fixed
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None
Description
As discussed in this PR, it is possible for a client (authenticated or not) to "SPAM" and corrupt the audit log.
As far as I can tell, the following works on any server, because the digest provider is always active and accepts (almost) arbitrary strings:
addauth digest veryimportant@EXAMPLE.COM:whatever create /dangerousnode
Note that "whatever" in the example above doesn't have to be a known or valid password. Similarly, the string to the left of : is not validated in any way; it is just copied as-is into the Id associated with the connection.
This results in entries akin to the following in the audit log:
2020-10-15 09:40:43,173 INFO audit.Log4jAuditLogger: session=0x100eefe34a40000 user=zkcli@CROSSTWINE.COM,veryimportant@EXAMPLE.COM,0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 ip=0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 operation=create znode=/dangerousnode znode_type=persistent result=success
Note how the scheme is not mentioned; all that is visible is the "user name" part of the Id.
This could lead an hypothetical audit application to conclude that it was okay for that connection to create /dangerousnode because it was "seriously" authenticated as veryimportant@EXAMPLE.COM.
It is possible to use that loophole to corrupt the audit log in various ways, including creating fake entries. It is not even necessary to use a dedicated client; Ctrl+Q Ctrl+J can cause literal newlines to be inserted via zkCli.sh:
addauth digest "fakeid^JTHIS REALLY SHOULDN'T BE THERE:whatever"
The result is a "two-line entry" in the audit log:
2020-10-16 21:42:06,546 INFO audit.Log4jAuditLogger: session=0x100f6b85af80001 user="fakeid THIS REALLY SHOULDN'T BE THERE,zkcli@CROSSTWINE.COM,0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 ip=0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 operation=create znode=/yolo4 znode_type=persistent result=success
I would suggest:
- Adding a setting which allows disabling the digest provider on production servers;
- Filtering (or quoting/escaping/censoring) the user names/principals which are written to the audit log (by scheme, or perhaps by dangerous characters).
