Analysis Summary

A critical security vulnerability, CVE-2024-56325, has been disclosed in Apache Pinot, allowing unauthenticated remote attackers to bypass authentication and gain unauthorized access. This flaw has received a maximum CVSS v3.0 score of 9.8, highlighting its severity. The vulnerability resides in the AuthenticationFilter class, where improper input sanitization enables attackers to craft malicious URIs containing unneutralized special characters, completely bypassing authentication. This issue violates the CWE-707 specification and affects Pinot versions prior to 1.3.0, posing a significant risk to organizations using the platform for real-time analytics, financial transactions, or IoT data processing.

The vulnerability requires no network privileges or user interaction and threatens confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Security analysts warn that exploitation only requires basic HTTP request manipulation, making it accessible to a wide range of attackers. A successful attack could lead to unauthorized data access, fraudulent record injection, or service disruptions, especially for cloud-hosted Pinot deployments. This flaw reflects broader trends in authentication weaknesses, following similar bypass vulnerabilities in Elasticsearch (CVE-2024-35253) and MongoDB Atlas (CVE-2024-48721). Given the public disclosure, security experts predict a high likelihood of exploitation within 30 days.

To mitigate the risk, administrators must immediately upgrade to Apache Pinot version 1.3.0, which patches the flawed URI parsing logic. Organizations should also audit access logs for suspicious activity, implement network segmentation, and apply Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules to filter malicious URI encodings. The incident highlights the critical need for strong authentication mechanisms in distributed systems and emphasizes the importance of software composition analysis (SCA) tools to detect vulnerabilities in data pipelines. While no active exploits have been observed yet, businesses relying on Pinot for compliance-sensitive operations should treat this issue as an urgent security priority.

Impact

• Security Bypass

Indicators of Compromise

CVE

• CVE-2024-56325

Affected Vendors

Remediation

Upgrade to the latest version of Apache Pinot (1.3.0 or later), available from the Apache Website.

Apache Website