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Apache Cassandra

By sorona.xyz Bug bounty on Sorona apache.org

Accepting reports open-source
Top reward
$1,500
Top severity paid
Critical
Assets in scope
14
Public CVEs
60
Last change
No changes yet

At a glance

What to know before you start testing.

Pays from $1,500
for critical bugs.
Partial safe harbor
Some legal protection; read the terms.
Publish after a fix
Coordinate the timing with the company.

Rewards

What Sorona lists as the payout for each severity.

Severity Reward
Critical $1,500+
High $700+
Medium $300+
Low $100 $100 / 1 month Claude Max
Safe harbor
Partial Sorona will not pursue legal action against you for good-faith research submitted to us in line with this policy. We cannot speak for the upstream project, its vendor, or any third party, and we do not grant authorization on their behalf.

Summarised with AI from the program policy on Sorona, read 12 Nov 2026, and checked word for word against it. Read the original

Scope

14 assets you may test, 6 excluded.

Web 1

  • https://cassandra.apache.org

Products and areas 13

  • Authentication and authorization providers: PasswordAuthenticator, CassandraAuthorizer, the role hierarchy, permission grants and the resource model those grants apply to
  • cqlsh and the tools the project ships, plus any sidecar or management API code in the project's repositories
  • Guardrails, timeouts and the limits meant to stop a single query taking down a node
  • JMX, nodetool and the management operations they expose, along with the audit logging and full query logging subsystems
  • Materialised views, secondary indexes and the SAI index implementation
  • Streaming, repair and hinted handoff, all of which move data files and mutations between nodes
  • The ASF security process accepts any undisclosed vulnerability in an Apache project privately, and Cassandra declares no scope narrower than the code the project releases. Everything below sits inside that
  • The commit log and its replay on startup, plus snapshot and incremental backup handling
  • The CQL parser and the native protocol between a client and a coordinator node, including every protocol version the server still accepts
  • The internode gossip and messaging protocols, including internode authentication, encryption and the decision that a peer belongs in the cluster
  • The storage engine, the SSTable format and the compaction path that rewrites it
  • User-defined functions and aggregates, the languages they may be written in, and the sandboxing and resource limits around their execution
  • Virtual tables, the system keyspaces and what a low-privileged role can read from them
Out of scope (6)
  • A cluster deliberately run with AllowAllAuthenticator or AllowAllAuthorizer, which is a configuration decision
  • Client drivers maintained outside the project's repositories
  • DataStax Enterprise, Instaclustr and other commercial distributions, which have their own vendors and their own reporting paths
  • JMX deliberately bound to a public interface without authentication, likewise a deployment decision the documentation warns against
  • Reports filed publicly on JIRA or GitHub rather than through the ASF security list
  • The JVM and the operating system underneath the node

Rules

What the policy asks of you, and the bug types it won't reward, quoted from Sorona's policy. "We" in these lines means Sorona, not this site.

While testing

  • Submit through sorona.xyz. This project runs no bounty of its own; we validate, coordinate disclosure with the maintainers, and pay you directly.
  • Report privately to the address on the policy page , the ASF security team address that the project's security policy points to
  • Do not open a public JIRA or GitHub issue for a security bug. The ASF process stays private until the announcement
  • Give the CQL statements, the role the session held and its grants. Authorization findings here depend entirely on the role hierarchy in place
  • Say whether the finding needs user-defined functions enabled, since many hardened deployments disable them and that changes the reachable surface substantially
  • Hold detail until the announcement goes out.

Summarised with AI from the program policy on Sorona, read 12 Nov 2026, and checked word for word against it. Read the original

Changes

Tracked since 11 Nov 2026. Last checked 1 hour ago.

No changes yet. When the rewards or scope move, you will see it here and in the RSS feed.

Public CVEs

Published vulnerabilities in this vendor's products, from the NVD.

Search NVD
CVESeverityPublished
CVE-2026-97355 Medium 6.5 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-97356 Medium 6.5 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-82960 High 8.8 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-83538 Medium 5.3 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-83542 Critical 9.8 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-84183 High 8.8 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-84728 Medium 5.4 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-85627 High 8.8 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-92887 High 7.3 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-82904 High 7.5 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-82907 Critical 9.8 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-82910 High 8.8 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-82912 High 8.8 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-82916 High 7.1 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-82902 Medium 4.3 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-114233 High 8.1 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-114235 Medium 6.5 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-114271 Medium 6.5 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-114272 Medium 6.5 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-114277 Medium 6.5 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-109129 Medium 5.4 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-109837 Medium 5.4 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-109856 Medium 6.5 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-109928 High 7.4 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-114229 Medium 6.1 5 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-59267 Medium 5.8 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-90631 Low 3.3 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-90632 Medium 5.5 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-90634 High 7.3 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-90627 Medium 5.5 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-90624 High 7.3 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-90626 High 7.3 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-90628 High 7.3 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-90629 High 7.3 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-59264 High 7.8 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-59268 High 7.3 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-59263 Low 1.9 4 Nov 2026
CVE-2026-64618 Critical 9.8 30 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-65874 High 8.8 30 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-95628 Medium 5.4 26 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-95629 Medium 5.4 26 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-95663 Medium 4.8 26 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-95664 Medium 5.4 26 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-101259 Medium 5.3 26 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-111497 Critical 9.2 22 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-88900 High 8.8 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85313 Medium 4.3 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85314 Medium 6.5 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85315 Medium 5.3 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85316 Medium 4.8 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85317 Medium 4.8 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85254 Medium 6.5 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85257 Medium 5.3 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85260 Medium 5.5 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85296 Medium 6.5 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85312 Medium 4.8 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85247 Medium 5.9 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85249 Medium 6.5 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85250 High 7.5 19 Oct 2026
CVE-2026-85251 High 7.5 19 Oct 2026

Original policy

Copied from sorona.xyz on 12 Nov 2026. The summaries on this page are made from it; the live page may have changed since.

Skip to content What this pays This project runs no bounty of its own. sorona.xyz pays you directly on qualified, reproduced findings. Severity │ sorona.xyz pays Critical │ $1,500+ High │ $700+ Medium │ $300+ Low │ $100 / 1 month Claude Max Submit a vulnerability CVE history 4 Last 12 months 13 Lifetime Sandbox escape 35 % Access control 30 % Auth bypass 20 % Parsing/validation 15 % Latest advisories Loading the feed Overview Cassandra is the wide-column store behind some of the largest production datasets in the world, chosen where a single cluster has to hold billions of rows across several datacentres and stay available while nodes fail. Apple, Netflix and a long list of enterprises run it, and what sits in it is usually the system of record rather than a cache. A defect in CQL authorization or in the internode protocol reads the whole keyspace. The Apache Software Foundation runs no bug bounty for any project and its process is a private report followed by a fixed release. sorona.xyz pays you directly on qualified, reproduced findings. In scope The ASF security process accepts any undisclosed vulnerability in an Apache project privately, and Cassandra declares no scope narrower than the code the project releases. Everything below sits inside that The CQL parser and the native protocol between a client and a coordinator node, including every protocol version the server still accepts Authentication and authorization providers: PasswordAuthenticator, CassandraAuthorizer, the role hierarchy, permission grants and the resource model those grants apply to User-defined functions and aggregates, the languages they may be written in, and the sandboxing and resource limits around their execution The internode gossip and messaging protocols, including internode authentication, encryption and the decision that a peer belongs in the cluster The storage engine, the SSTable format and the compaction path that rewrites it Streaming, repair and hinted handoff, all of which move data files and mutations between nodes The commit log and its replay on startup, plus snapshot and incremental backup handling Materialised views, secondary indexes and the SAI index implementation JMX, nodetool and the management operations they expose, along with the audit logging and full query logging subsystems Virtual tables, the system keyspaces and what a low-privileged role can read from them cqlsh and the tools the project ships, plus any sidecar or management API code in the project's repositories Guardrails, timeouts and the limits meant to stop a single query taking down a node Out of scope DataStax Enterprise, Instaclustr and other commercial distributions, which have their own vendors and their own reporting paths Client drivers maintained outside the project's repositories The JVM and the operating system underneath the node A cluster deliberately run with AllowAllAuthenticator or AllowAllAuthorizer, which is a configuration decision JMX deliberately bound to a public interface without authentication, likewise a deployment decision the documentation warns against Reports filed publicly on JIRA or GitHub rather than through the ASF security list Most-valued findings Sandbox escape out of user-defined functions or aggregates into JVM execution on a node. That is the highest-severity shape this architecture allows, since a node holds every replica it stores in plaintext on disk Authorization defects where a role reads or writes a keyspace, table or column its grants never covered, including permissions inherited through the role hierarchy and permissions on materialised views that differ from their base table Authentication bypass in the native protocol handshake or in the internode messaging path, both of which decide identity before anything else happens Internode gossip and streaming paths that trust a peer that has not authenticated, since a node admitted to the cluster receives replicas of everything SSTable, commit log and snapshot parsing on load, because a node accepts these files from streaming, repair and restore rather than only from an operator JMX exposure escalating into code execution on a node, the recurring shape in JVM data infrastructure Query paths an ordinary role can drive into a crash or into memory corruption, given that a coordinator accepts arbitrary CQL from every application client The study records CVE-2021-44521 and CVE-2025-23015 for this project and describes neither. Treat that published record as thin rather than as evidence the surface is clean Program rules Submit through sorona.xyz. This project runs no bounty of its own; we validate, coordinate disclosure with the maintainers, and pay you directly. Report privately to [email protected] , the ASF security team address that the project's security policy points to Do not open a public JIRA or GitHub issue for a security bug. The ASF process stays private until the announcement The ASF states that it does not have a bug bounty program and does not endorse or offer one for any of its projects. There is no reward at any severity DataStax Enterprise and Instaclustr are commercial products built on this code. Neither runs a public paid bounty for OSS Cassandra, and a finding against their builds belongs with them Give the CQL statements, the role the session held and its grants. Authorization findings here depend entirely on the role hierarchy in place Say whether the finding needs user-defined functions enabled, since many hardened deployments disable them and that changes the reachable surface substantially Disclosure Coordinated by the ASF security team with the Cassandra project management committee, which takes the report privately, works the fix and publishes a CVE alongside fixed releases across the supported series. Cassandra clusters are upgraded slowly and in place, so coordination runs to those releases rather than to a day count you choose. Hold detail until the announcement goes out. Safe harbor Sorona will not pursue legal action against you for good-faith research submitted to us in line with this policy. We cannot speak for the upstream project, its vendor, or any third party, and we do not grant authorization on their behalf. You are responsible for understanding and following the laws that apply to you, wherever you are, and for staying within any scope the project has defined. Submit a vulnerability