Amazon EMR Secret Agent Exposes Kerb Keytab in /tmp (v7.4 and earlier)
CVE-2025-8904 Published on August 13, 2025
Privilege escalation issue in Amazon EMR Secret Agent component
Amazon EMR Secret Agent creates a keytab file containing Kerberos credentials. This file is stored in the /tmp/ directory. A user with access to this directory and another account can potentially decrypt the keys and escalate to higher privileges.
Users are advised to upgrade to Amazon EMR version 7.5 or higher. For Amazon EMR releases between 6.10 and 7.4, we strongly recommend that you run the bootstrap script and RPM files with the fix provided in the location below.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2025-8904 is exploitable with network access, and requires small amount of user privileges. This vulnerability is consided to have a high level of attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be very high.
Weakness Type
Storing Passwords in a Recoverable Format
The storage of passwords in a recoverable format makes them subject to password reuse attacks by malicious users. In fact, it should be noted that recoverable encrypted passwords provide no significant benefit over plaintext passwords since they are subject not only to reuse by malicious attackers but also by malicious insiders. If a system administrator can recover a password directly, or use a brute force search on the available information, the administrator can use the password on other accounts.
Products Associated with CVE-2025-8904
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Affected Versions
Amazon EMR:- Version 6.10 and below 7.4 is affected.
Exploit Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.