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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.5

CVE-2024-31141 json

Apache Kafka Clients: Privilege escalation to filesystem read-access via automatic ConfigProvider

published 2024-11-19 23 mo ago modified 2026-09-10 1 mo ago also EUVD-2024-3337 , GHSA-2x2g-32r7-p4x8

cvss
6.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.3%
EPSS 1.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 71%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Files or Directories Accessible to External Parties, Improper Privilege Management vulnerability in Apache Kafka Clients.

Apache Kafka Clients accept configuration data for customizing behavior, and includes ConfigProvider plugins in order to manipulate these configurations. Apache Kafka also provides FileConfigProvider, DirectoryConfigProvider, and EnvVarConfigProvider implementations which include the ability to read from disk or environment variables. In applications where Apache Kafka Clients configurations can be specified by an untrusted party, attackers may use these ConfigProviders to read arbitrary contents of the disk and environment variables.

In particular, this flaw may be used in Apache Kafka Connect to escalate from REST API access to filesystem/environment access, which may be undesirable in certain environments, including SaaS products. This issue affects Apache Kafka Clients: from 2.3.0 through 3.5.2, 3.6.2, 3.7.0.

Users with affected applications are recommended to upgrade kafka-clients to version >=3.8.0, and set the JVM system property "org.apache.kafka.automatic.config.providers=none". Users of Kafka Connect with one of the listed ConfigProvider implementations specified in their worker config are also recommended to add appropriate "allowlist.pattern" and "allowed.paths" to restrict their operation to appropriate bounds.

For users of Kafka Clients or Kafka Connect in environments that trust users with disk and environment variable access, it is not recommended to set the system property. For users of the Kafka Broker, Kafka MirrorMaker 2.0, Kafka Streams, and Kafka command-line tools, it is not recommended to set the system property.

Patch / fix

  • maven org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients 3.7.1
  • org.apache.kafka kafka-clients 3.7.1

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-2024-31141 updated cvss 5.3

kafka-clients: privilege escalation to filesystem read-access via automatic ConfigProvider

  • Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4 for Quarkus 3 kafka-clients Red Hat build of Apicurio Registry 2 kafka-clients
    affected: workaround, no fix available
  • Red Hat build of Debezium 2 kafka-clients Red Hat Data Grid 8 kafka-clients
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Fuse 7 kafka-clients Red Hat Integration Camel K 1 kafka-clients Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 7 kafka-clients Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Expansion Pack kafka-clients, org.jboss.eap-jboss-eap-xp org.jboss.eap-jboss-eap-xp Red Hat Process Automation 7 kafka-clients Red Hat streams for Apache Kafka kafka-clients
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4.8 for Spring Boot
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2024:10700
  • Red Hat Streams for Apache Kafka 2.9.0
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2025:2416
  • Red Hat Streams for Apache Kafka 2.9.1
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2025:9922
  • Red Hat Streams for Apache Kafka 3.0.0
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2025:12511
  • Red Hat A-MQ Clients 2 kafka-clients Red Hat Logging Subsystem for Red Hat OpenShift kafka-clients Red Hat build of Quarkus kafka-clients Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7 kafka-clients Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 8 kafka-clients, org.jboss.eap-jboss-eap-xp org.jboss.eap-jboss-eap-xp
    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

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
23 mo ago

Exploit prediction

1.33% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 71% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CISA ADP 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
GitHub 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CNA 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
maven org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients
>=2.3.0, <3.7.1
3.7.1

Affected products

  • Apache Software Foundation Apache Kafka Clients

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-552 Files or Directories Accessible to External Parties
  • CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns 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.

CPEs and fixed versions use Anchore's correction of NVD's data: Added CPE configurations because not yet analyzed by NVD.