The Kerberos/MapReduce security functionality in Apache Hadoop 0.20.203.0 through 0.20.205.0, 0.23.x before 0.23.2, and 1.0.x before 1.0.2, as used in Cloudera CDH CDH3u0 through CDH3u2, Cloudera hadoop-0.20-sbin before 0.20.2+923.197, and other products, allows remote authenticated users to impersonate arbitrary cluster user accounts via unspecified vectors.

It was reported [1] that:

"The Apache Hadoop RPC protocol is intended to provide bidirectional authentication between clients and servers. However, a malicious server or network attacker can unilaterally disable these authentication checks. This allows for potential reduction in the configured quality of protection of the RPC traffic, and privilege escalation if authentication credentials are passed over RPC."

This flaw only affects users who have enabled Hadoop's kerberos security features. This is corrected in upstream versions 0.23.9, 1.2.1, and 2.0.6-alpha.

[1] http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Aug/251

The YARN NodeManager daemon in Apache Hadoop 0.23.0 through 0.23.11 and 2.x before 2.5.2, when using Kerberos authentication, allows remote cluster users to change the permissions of certain files to world-readable via a symlink attack in a public tar archive, which is not properly handled during localization, related to distributed cache.

Apache Hadoop 0.23.x before 0.23.11 and 2.x before 2.4.1, as used in Cloudera CDH 5.0.x before 5.0.2, do not check authorization for the (1) refreshNamenodes, (2) deleteBlockPool, and (3) shutdownDatanode HDFS admin commands, which allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (DataNodes shutdown) or perform unnecessary operations by issuing a command.