Pipe Dreams: Stealing Admin Privileges in Apache StreamPipes (CVE-2025-47411)

Apache StreamPipes is the heavy lifter of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) world. It's the toolbox that connects the messy reality of factory sensors, PLCs, and data streams to the neat, orderly world of analytics. It’s designed to let non-developers build complex data pipelines. If you control StreamPipes, you control the logic of the factory floor. You decide if the temperature sensor triggers an alarm or if it stays silent while the furnace overheats.

Now, imagine if the janitor could walk into the CEO's office, swap nameplates on the desk, and suddenly the payroll department starts cutting checks to the janitor. That is effectively what CVE-2025-47411 is. It is a classic, almost nostalgic, logic flaw in identity management.

This isn't a complex memory corruption bug involving heap feng shui. It’s a logic error in how the application handles the concept of 'Who are you?'. It turns out, StreamPipes was a bit too trusting when a user said, 'Actually, I'm the Admin now.'

The vulnerability resides in the User ID creation and management mechanism. In a robust system, the unique identifier (primary key) of a user is immutable, or at least heavily guarded. In StreamPipes versions prior to 0.98.0, the username—often used as the lookup key for authentication claims—was treated as a mutable field without sufficient uniqueness checks during the update process.

Here is the breakdown of the failure:

1. Mutability: The application allows users to update their profile information, including their username.
2. Collision Ignorance: When a low-privileged user submits a request to change their username to admin (or whatever the superuser account is named), the backend fails to verify if that target username already exists and belongs to a different entity with higher privileges.
3. Token Generation Trust: The fatal blow comes from the JWT generation logic. When the attacker—now legally named admin in the database (or aliased to it)—requests a new session token, the Identity Provider looks up the user by username. It sees admin, fetches the associated roles (which are ROLE_ADMIN), and mints a shiny new JWT signed with administrative claims.

It is a privilege escalation vulnerability that relies entirely on the application's confusion between who you were (authenticated session) and who you want to be (profile update payload).

While the exact patch diff covers multiple files, the logical vulnerability can be visualized in the controller handling user updates. In the vulnerable versions, the logic effectively boiled down to a 'Save whatever they send us' approach.

Consider this pseudo-code representation of the vulnerable logic:

// VULNERABLE LOGIC RECONSTRUCTION
@PutMapping(path = "/api/v2/users/me")
public Response updateUser(@RequestBody UserDetails explicitUpdate) {
    // 1. Get the currently logged-in user
    String currentUsername = SecurityContext.getUser().getUsername();
    User currentUser = userRepository.findByUsername(currentUsername);
 
    // 2. Blindly map the input fields to the current user object
    // CRITICAL FLAW: No check if explicitUpdate.username already exists!
    currentUser.setUsername(explicitUpdate.getUsername());
    currentUser.setFullName(explicitUpdate.getFullName());
    
    // 3. Save the changes
    userRepository.save(currentUser);
    
    return Response.ok("Profile updated");
}

The fix, introduced in version 0.98.0, involves strictly enforcing uniqueness constraints and likely preventing non-admins from modifying sensitive identifiers entirely. The remediation ensures that if a user tries to claim an existing username, the transaction is rejected before it hits the database.

[!NOTE] The Architectural Sin The deeper architectural sin here is using a mutable field (username) as the immutable subject (sub) or lookup key for permission granting in JWTs. IDs should be UUIDs; usernames are just vanity plates.

Exploiting this requires a valid, low-level account. If self-registration is enabled (common in dev/test environments), the attacker creates an account. If not, they compromise a low-level credential. Once inside, the path to ROOT is trivial.

Step 1: Reconnaissance First, we confirm the username of the target. Defaults are usually admin, admin@streampipes.apache.org, or similar. We can often enumerate this via error messages or logs.

Step 2: The Identity Swap We intercept our own 'Update Profile' request using a proxy like Burp Suite. We modify the JSON body to claim the target username.

PUT /streampipes-backend/api/v2/users/me HTTP/1.1
Host: target-iot-system.local
Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUz...
Content-Type: application/json
 
{
  "username": "admin@streampipes.apache.org",
  "fullName": "Hacker",
  "password": "newpassword123" 
}

Step 3: The Prestige If the server responds with 200 OK, the database record is updated. However, our current JWT is still valid for our old identity. To trigger the escalation, we need the system to issue a new token based on our new data.

We simply log out and log back in (or hit a token refresh endpoint) using the credentials we just set (or the original ones, depending on how the auth provider handles the password link). The server receives the login request for admin@streampipes.apache.org, validates the password, and issues a token.

{
  "sub": "admin@streampipes.apache.org",
  "roles": [
    "ROLE_ADMIN",
    "ROLE_PIPELINE_ADMIN"
  ],
  "iat": 1704067200
}

We now have full control over the industrial pipeline.

Because StreamPipes is an IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) platform, the impact extends beyond data theft. We aren't just stealing credit card numbers here; we are messing with physical processes.

1. Denial of Service (Physical) An attacker can stop all data adapters. If the factory relies on StreamPipes to monitor pressure valves or temperature gauges, blinding the system can lead to physical equipment damage or safety shutdowns.

2. Integrity Compromise StreamPipes allows users to define 'processors'—logic blocks that transform data. An admin can inject a processor that falsifies sensor readings. Imagine a temperature sensor reading 500°C, but the attacker modifies the pipeline to report 200°C to the dashboard. The operators think everything is fine while the machine melts down.

3. Lateral Movement StreamPipes often holds credentials for other systems (MQTT brokers, PLCs, databases like InfluxDB or Kafka) to connect adapters. As an admin, an attacker can extract these credentials to pivot deeper into the OT (Operational Technology) network.

The only reliable fix is to upgrade to Apache StreamPipes 0.98.0. The developers have patched the user management service to correctly validate inputs and prevent username collisions.

If you are stuck on an older version (because upgrading OT equipment requires a literal act of Congress or a scheduled plant shutdown), you have limited options:

• Disable Self-Registration: Ensure no randoms can create accounts.
• WAF Filtering: You could theoretically block PUT requests to /api/v2/users/me where the body contains "username": "admin", but this is fragile. JSON obfuscation or different encoding could bypass the WAF.
• Database Triggers: A DBA could place a trigger on the user table to reject updates that change a non-admin username to an admin username, but modifying the database of a vendor product is risky business.

Just upgrade the software. It's safer than explaining why the assembly line stopped.