Critical Apache Submarine Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2023-46302)

A critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting Apache Submarine, a popular end-to-end machine learning (ML) platform, has been discovered and assigned the identifier CVE-2023-46302. This vulnerability, traced to a security flaw in snakeyaml (CVE-2022-1471), poses a significant threat to organizations utilizing Apache Submarine for their ML workflows.

Apache Submarine is an End-to-End Machine Learning Platform to allows data scientists to create end-to-end machine-learning workflows. On Submarine, data scientists can finish each stage in the ML model lifecycle, including data exploration, data pipeline creation, model training, serving, and monitoring.

The CVE-2023-46302 vulnerability arises when Apache Submarine serializes data against YAML. During this process, the platform utilizes the JAXRS framework to define REST endpoints. To handle YAML requests, it employs the YamlEntityProvider entity provider. When an incoming YAML request is received, the readFrom method is invoked to unmarshal the request, utilizing the entityStream containing the user-supplied data.

This vulnerability affects Apache Submarine versions 0.7.0 through 0.7.2. If exploited, this vulnerability could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems, potentially gaining control of the affected ML infrastructure. This could lead to data breaches, unauthorized access to sensitive information, and disruption of critical ML operations.

To effectively address this critical vulnerability, Apache Submarine users are strongly advised to upgrade to version 0.8.0 immediately. This version incorporates the necessary patches to rectify the security flaw and safeguard against potential exploitation.

For users navigating with versions older than 0.8.0 who are reluctant or unable to upgrade immediately, there is an alternative route. They can manually cherry-pick the relevant Pull Request (PR) and rebuild their submart-server image, providing a temporary fix to this pressing issue.