John Fitzpatrick of MWR InfoSecurity discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability in torque, a PBS-derived batch processing queueing system. The torque authentication model revolves around the use of privileged ports. If a request is not made from a privileged port then it is assumed not to be trusted or authenticated. It was found that pbs_mom does not perform a check to ensure that connections are established from a privileged port. A user who can run jobs or login to a node running pbs_server or pbs_mom can exploit this vulnerability to remotely execute code as root on the cluster by submitting a command directly to a pbs_mom daemon to queue and run a job.