The 2023 Pwnie Nominee For Best Privilege Escalation Bug

Bypassing Cluster Operation in Databricks Platform

Florian Roth and Marius Bartholdy at Sec-Consult

Don’t get us wrong; this is important research. Shout out for nominating yourselves 12 times, guys. A low-privileged user was able to break the isolation between Databricks compute clusters within the boundary of the same workspace and organization by gaining remote code execution. This subsequently would have allowed an attacker to access all files and secrets in the workspace as well as escalating their privilege to those of a workspace administrator.

But you’re supposed to get other people to at least pretend to nominate you.