CVE-2017-9792 Apache Impala (incubating) Information Disclosure

[Bharath Vissapragada <bh...@cloudera.com>]

CVE-2017-9792 Apache Impala (incubating) Information Disclosure

Severity: High

Versions Affected: 2.8.0, 2.9.0

Description:
A malicious user with “ALTER” permissions on an Impala table can access any
other Kudu table data by altering the table properties to make it
“external” and then changing the underlying table mapping to point to other
Kudu tables. This violates and works around the authorization requirement
that creating a Kudu external table via Impala requires an “ALL” privilege
at the server scope. This privilege requirement for “CREATE” commands is
enforced to precisely avoid this scenario where a malicious user can change
the underlying Kudu table mapping. The fix is to enforce the same privilege
requirement for “ALTER” commands that would make existing non-external Kudu
tables external.

Mitigation:
A temporary workaround is to revoke "ALTER" permissions on Impala tables. A
permanent fix is included in Apache Impala (incubating) 2.10.0 release and
the affected users should upgrade to that version.

Credit: This issue was identified and fixed by Matthew Jacobs.

References: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/IMPALA-5638