CVE-2022-33891: Apache Spark Command Injection Vulnerability

High severity, CVSS 8.8. Actively exploited: in CISA KEV since 2023-03-07. EPSS: 93.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The Apache Spark UI offers the possibility to enable ACLs via the configuration option spark.acls.enable. With an authentication filter, this checks whether a user has access permissions to view or modify the application. If ACLs are enabled, a code path in HttpSecurityFilter can allow someone to perform impersonation by providing an arbitrary user name. A malicious user might then be able to reach a permission check function that will ultimately build a Unix shell command based on their input, and execute it. This will result in arbitrary shell command execution as the user Spark is currently running as. This affects Apache Spark versions 3.0.3 and earlier, versions 3.1.1 to 3.1.2, and versions 3.2.0 to 3.2.1.

Affected products

• Apache Spark: up to and including 3.0.3; from 3.1.1, up to and including 3.1.2; from 3.2.0, up to and including 3.2.1

Published 2022-07-18. Last modified 2026-06-17.