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Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients package, versions [2.3.0,3.4.0)

0.0
medium

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity High

    Threat Intelligence

    Exploit Maturity Proof of concept
    EPSS 96.92% (100th percentile)
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NVD
8.8 high

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JAVA-ORGAPACHEKAFKA-3317161
  • published 9 Feb 2023
  • disclosed 7 Feb 2023
  • credit Jari Jääskelä, 4ra1n, Y4tacker
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Introduced: 7 Feb 2023

CVE-2023-25194 Open this link in a new tab
CWE-502 Open this link in a new tab

How to fix?

Upgrade org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients to version 3.4.0 or higher.

Overview

org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients is a streaming platform that can publish and subscribe to streams of records, store streams of records in a fault-tolerant durable way, and process streams of records as they occur.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data when there are gadgets in the classpath. The server will connect to the attacker's LDAP server and deserialize the LDAP response, which the attacker can use to execute java deserialization gadget chains on the Kafka connect server.

Note: Exploitation requires access to a Kafka Connect worker, and the ability to create/modify connectors on it with an arbitrary Kafka client SASL JAAS config and a SASL-based security protocol.

Mitigation

  1. Kafka Connect users are advised to validate connector configurations and only allow trusted JNDI configurations.

  2. Users should examine connector dependencies for vulnerable versions and either upgrade their connectors, upgrading that specific dependency, or removing the connectors as options for remediation.

  3. Kafka Connect users can also implement their own connector client config override policy, which can be used to control which Kafka client properties can be overridden directly in a connector config and which cannot.

Details

Serialization is a process of converting an object into a sequence of bytes which can be persisted to a disk or database or can be sent through streams. The reverse process of creating object from sequence of bytes is called deserialization. Serialization is commonly used for communication (sharing objects between multiple hosts) and persistence (store the object state in a file or a database). It is an integral part of popular protocols like Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java Management Extension (JMX), Java Messaging System (JMS), Action Message Format (AMF), Java Server Faces (JSF) ViewState, etc.

Deserialization of untrusted data (CWE-502) is when the application deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid, thus allowing the attacker to control the state or the flow of the execution.