CVE-2026-42809: critical vulnerability in Apache Polaris
Apache Polaris: staged table creation could vend storage credentials for unvalidated locations
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
28Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 9.4epss 0.4%
Apache Polaris can issue broad temporary ("vended") storage credentials during
staged
table creation before the effective table location has been validated or
durably reserved.
Those temporary credentials are meant to limit the scope
of
accessible table data and metadata, but this scope limitation becomes
attacker-
directed because the attacker can choose a reachable target location.
In the confirmed variant, if the caller supplies a custom `location` during
stage create and requests credential vending, Apache Polaris uses that location to
construct delegated storage credentials immediately. The stage-create path
itself neither runs the normal location validation nor the overlap checks
before those credentials are issued.
Closely related to that, the staged-create flow also accepts
`write.data.path` / `write.metadata.path` in the request properties and
feeds
those location overrides into the same effective table location set used for
credential vending. Those fields are secondary to the main custom-`location`
exploit, but they are still attacker-influenced location inputs that should
be
validated before any credentials are issued.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H
Affected products
Apache Software Foundation · Apache PolarisRelated CVEs — Apache Polaris
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-64640MEDIUMApache Polaris: register endpoint reads attacker-controlled storage location before allowed-locations validationEPSS 0.5%CVE-2026-42811CRITICALApache Polaris: could broaden vended GCS credentials through unescaped identifier content in access-boundary CEL conditionsEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-42810CRITICALApache Polaris: could broaden vended S3 credentials through wildcard-bearing namespace or table namesEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-42812CRITICALApache Polaris: No protection on `write.metadata.path`EPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-97395HIGHApache Polaris: Allows authorized table writers to redirect server-side Iceberg FileIO requests to attacker-controlled endpoints using operation-scoped storage credentialsEPSS 0.3%