Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients package, versions [2.3.0,3.9.1)
Threat Intelligence
The probability is the direct output of the EPSS model, and conveys an overall sense of the threat of exploitation in the wild. The percentile measures the EPSS probability relative to all known EPSS scores. Note: This data is updated daily, relying on the latest available EPSS model version. Check out the EPSS documentation for more details.
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- published13 Jun 2025
- disclosed10 Jun 2025
- credit罗鑫, ra1lgun
Introduced: 10 Jun 2025
NewCVE-2025-27818 (opens in a new tab)How to fix?
Upgrade org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients to version 3.9.1 or higher.
Overview
org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients is a streaming platform that can publish and subscribe to streams of records, store streams of records in a fault-tolerant durable way, and process streams of records as they occur.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data due to improper handling of configuration data in the sasl.jaas.config property. An attacker can achieve arbitrary code execution by injecting a malicious configuration that causes the server to connect to an attacker-controlled LDAP server and deserialize untrusted data, leading to execution of deserialization gadget chains.
Note:
This is only exploitable if the attacker has access to alterConfig for a cluster resource or Kafka Connect worker and can create or modify connectors with arbitrary Kafka client SASL JAAS configuration.
Details
Serialization is a process of converting an object into a sequence of bytes which can be persisted to a disk or database or can be sent through streams. The reverse process of creating object from sequence of bytes is called deserialization. Serialization is commonly used for communication (sharing objects between multiple hosts) and persistence (store the object state in a file or a database). It is an integral part of popular protocols like Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java Management Extension (JMX), Java Messaging System (JMS), Action Message Format (AMF), Java Server Faces (JSF) ViewState, etc.
Deserialization of untrusted data (CWE-502) is when the application deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid, thus allowing the attacker to control the state or the flow of the execution.