Apache Solr's Kerberos plugin can be configured to use delegation tokens, which allows an application to reuse the authentication of an end-user or another application. There are two issues with this functionality (when using SecurityAwareZkACLProvider type of ACL provider e.g. SaslZkACLProvider). Firstly, access to the security configuration can be leaked to users other than the solr super user. Secondly, malicious users can exploit this leaked configuration for privilege escalation to further expose/modify private data and/or disrupt operations in the Solr cluster. The vulnerability is fixed from Apache Solr 6.6.1 onwards.

Apache Solr uses a PKI based mechanism to secure inter-node communication when security is enabled. It is possible to create a specially crafted node name that does not exist as part of the cluster and point it to a malicious node. This can trick the nodes in cluster to believe that the malicious node is a member of the cluster. So, if Solr users have enabled BasicAuth authentication mechanism using the BasicAuthPlugin or if the user has implemented a custom Authentication plugin, which does not implement either "HttpClientInterceptorPlugin" or "HttpClientBuilderPlugin", his/her servers are vulnerable to this attack. Users who only use SSL without basic authentication or those who use Kerberos are not affected.