Apache Storm Worker Launcher: Local Privilege Escalation to Root via a Time-of-Check Race in the Worker Launcher
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fixed in 3.1.0
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
- Exploitation: none
- Automatable: no
- Technical impact: total
Summary
The setuid-root `worker-launcher` binary adjusts ownership and permissions of worker directories by walking the tree with FTS and calling `lchown` and `chmod` on each entry's full pathname while running with an effective uid of 0. Both syscalls re-resolve the path at the time of the call, after FTS has classified the entry, and the trees being walked are owned and writable by the untrusted topology user. A tenant running code on a supervisor node could therefore replace an intermediate directory component with a symbolic link between classification and the privileged operation, redirecting the root-owned `lchown` or `chmod` at an arbitrary file on the host. The operation is repeatable at will, since crashing a worker forces a relaunch and blob updates re-run the walk, so a failed attempt costs the attacker nothing. This crosses the boundary that `supervisor.run.worker.as.user` and container isolation are intended to enforce. It is the same defect class as the Hadoop container-executor issues from which this code derives. Mitigation Upgrade to 3.1.0, where the privileged walk operates on file descriptors it has already stat'd rather than on pathnames re-resolved at call time. Users who cannot upgrade immediately should not run untrusted topology code on supervisors configured with `supervisor.run.worker.as.user`, since the launcher is the boundary being crossed. Note that the launcher must be rebuilt and reinstalled after upgrading; replacing the Java artifacts alone is not sufficient. Credit The ASF -- found using Claude agents to study the security of open-source projects, validated and reported by Apache Storm.
Timeline
- CVE published
- CISA SSVC assessment
Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: total
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- org.apache.storm:storm-core
From 3.0.0 · fixed in 3.1.0