Arbitrary File Write The advisory has been revoked - it doesn't affect any version of package org.apache.hive:hive-common  (opens in a new tab)

This was deemed not a vulnerability.

org.apache.hive:hive-common is a reading, writing, and managing large datasets residing in distributed storage using SQL.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Write via the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client functionality. Hive gives an SQL-like interface to query data stored in various databases and file systems that integrate with Hadoop. Among other things, it supports copying data from FTP servers, using the COPY-FROM-FTP command.

COPY FROM FTP host [USER user [PWD password]] [DIR directory] [FILES files_wildcard]
  [TO [LOCAL] target_directory] [options]

options:
  OVERWRITE | NEW
  SUBDIR
  SESSIONS num

A possible attack can be overriding the ssh authorized_keys file for the root user, making it possible to login as root later on. Assumming that Apache Hive instance connects to the attacker's malicious FTP server, to download some merchant data daily, by using the following query:

COPY FROM FTP remote.merchant.domain.com
  USER 'foo' PWD '***'
  DIR data/sales/in FILES  '.*'
  TO /data/sales/raw OVERWRITE

The malicious FTP server would send back path traversal filenames to the client. For instance, responding to a LIST command with ../../../../../../../home/root/.ssh/authorized_keys.

When Hive executes the above statement (assuming it’s running as root), root’s authorized_keys ssh file will be overwritten with one known by the attacker.

FTP is a standard network protocol used to transfer files between a client and server. Out of the box, it does not offer a download folder command, but it does allow the following:

1. Listing all of the files in a remote folder (LIST or NLST FTP commands)
2. For each file in the list results above: Download the file and save it to a local folder (GET or MGET FTP commands)

The following is an example of some Java code downloading a folder, using the Apache commons-net library:

private void downloadDirectory(FTPClient ftpClient, String remoteDir, String localDir) throws IOException
{
  FTPFile[] subFiles = ftpClient.listFiles(remoteDir);
  for (FTPFile aFile : subFiles)
  {
    if (!aFile.isDirectory())
    {
       String remoteFile = ftpClient.printWorkingDirectory() + File.separator + aFile.getName();
       String localFile = localDir + File.separator + aFile.getName();

   OutputStream downloadedStream = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(new File(localFile)));
   boolean success = ftpClient.retrieveFile(remoteFile, downloadedStream);
   outputStream.close();			
}

  }
}

The code above, iterates over each file returned by the server, and downloads it into a local destination folder. So for example, if the first file in the remote folder is named passwd, and the local destination folder is /var/data/sync/, it'd end up downloading the file to /var/data/sync/passwd.

But if the FTP server turns malicious, and instead of responding to the LIST command with passwd, it responds with ../../../../etc/passwd as the filename. The code above will end up placing the file into /var/data/sync/../../../../etc/passwd, practically overwriting /etc/passwd with the newly downloaded file.

For more information you can check out our blog post.

• Attacking an FTP Client: MGETting more than you bargained for