Description
A Spring MVC or Spring WebFlux application running on JDK 9+ may be vulnerable to remote code execution (RCE) via data binding. The specific exploit requires the application to run on Tomcat as a WAR deployment. If the application is deployed as a Spring Boot executable jar, i.e. the default, it is not vulnerable to the exploit. However, the nature of the vulnerability is more general, and there may be other ways to exploit it.
These are the prerequisites for the exploit:
- JDK 9 or higher
- Apache Tomcat as the Servlet container
- Packaged as WAR
- spring-webmvc or spring-webflux dependency
Affected Spring Products and Versions
Spring Framework:
- 5.3.0 - 5.3.17
- 5.2.19.RELEASE and earlier
Mitigation
Users of affected versions should upgrade to the corresponding fixed version.
| Fix version | Availability |
|---|---|
| 5.3.18 | OSS |
| 5.2.20.RELEASE | OSS |
No other steps are necessary. There are other mitigation steps for applications that cannot upgrade to the above versions. Those are described in the early announcement blog post, listed under the Resources section.
Credit
This vulnerability was responsibly reported to VMware by codeplutos, meizjm3i of AntGroup FG Security Lab. A secondary report was also received from Praetorian.
References
History
- 2022-03-31: Initial vulnerability report published.