It was noticed that a malicious process impersonating an Impala daemon in Apache Impala (incubating) 2.7.0 to 2.8.0 could cause Impala daemons to skip authentication checks when Kerberos is enabled (but TLS is not). If the malicious server responds with 'COMPLETE' before the SASL handshake has completed, the client will consider the handshake as completed even though no exchange of credentials has happened.

Insufficient authorization of Data Source tables in Impala 2.7-4.5 allows a client with privileges to upload a file to remote storage and create a table to execute arbitrary Java code. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 4.5.2, which fixes this issue.

During a routine security analysis, it was found that one of the ports in Apache Impala (incubating) 2.7.0 to 2.8.0 sent data in plaintext even when the cluster was configured to use TLS. The port in question was used by the StatestoreSubscriber class which did not use the appropriate secure Thrift transport when TLS was turned on. It was therefore possible for an adversary, with access to the network, to eavesdrop on the packets going to and coming from that port and view the data in plaintext.

In Apache Impala 2.7.0 to 3.2.0, an authenticated user with access to the IDs of active Impala queries or sessions can interact with those sessions or queries via a specially-constructed request and thereby potentially bypass authorization and audit mechanisms. Session and query IDs are unique and random, but have not been documented or consistently treated as sensitive secrets. Therefore they may be exposed in logs or interfaces. They were also not generated with a cryptographically secure random number generator, so are vulnerable to random number generator attacks that predict future IDs based on past IDs. Impala deployments with Apache Sentry or Apache Ranger authorization enabled may be vulnerable to privilege escalation if an authenticated attacker is able to hijack a session or query from another authenticated user with privileges not assigned to the attacker. Impala deployments with audit logging enabled may be vulnerable to incorrect audit logging as a user could undertake actions that were logged under the name of a different authenticated user. Constructing an attack requires a high degree of technical sophistication and access to the Impala system as an authenticated user.

Specifying tblproperties('avro.schema.url'=' http://...' ) or with a 'file:///' URI on a table in Impala 2.0.0 to 4.5.1 on all platforms allows an attacker to trigger a GET request to internal endpoints they may not have access to but that Impala does and the response my be exposed via parsing error messages. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 4.5.2, which fixes this issue.