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Fencer Intel
critical 9.8

CVE-2020-9480 in the critical feed json

Improper Authentication in Apache Spark

published 6y ago modified 2mo ago also BIT-spark-2020-9480 , EUVD-2020-0158 , GHSA-wgx7-jwwm-cgjv , PYSEC-2020-95

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
30.2%
EPSS 30.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 98%
public exploits
0
none known, plus a Nuclei check

Summary

In Apache Spark 2.4.5 and earlier, a standalone resource manager's master may be configured to require authentication (spark.authenticate) via a shared secret. When enabled, however, a specially-crafted RPC to the master can succeed in starting an application's resources on the Spark cluster, even without the shared key. This can be leveraged to execute shell commands on the host machine. This does not affect Spark clusters using other resource managers (YARN, Mesos, etc).

Patch / fix

  • maven org.apache.spark:spark-parent_2.11 2.4.6
  • pypi pyspark 2.4.6
  • bitnami spark 2.4.6

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2020-9480 updated cvss 9.8

apache-spark: RCE vulnerability in auth-enabled standalone master

  • Red Hat Fuse 7 apache-spark apache-spark Red Hat Integration Camel K 1 apache-spark apache-spark Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 7 apache-spark apache-spark Red Hat JBoss Fuse 6 apache-spark apache-spark
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

30.20% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 98% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
GitHub 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 9.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C
OSV 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
maven org.apache.spark:spark-parent_2.11
<2.4.6
2.4.6
pypi pyspark
<2.4.6
2.4.6
bitnami spark
<2.4.6
2.4.6

Affected products

  • Apache Software Foundation Apache Spark

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-287 Improper Authentication
  • CWE-306 Missing Authentication for Critical Functionality

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.