Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting org.apache.mina:mina-core package, versions [2.0.0,2.0.27)[2.1.0,2.1.10)[2.2.0,2.2.4)

org.apache.mina:mina-core is a network application framework which helps users develop high performance and high scalability network applications easily.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data through the ObjectSerializationDecoder due to improper user input sanitization. An attacker can execute arbitrary code by sending specially crafted malicious serialized data.

Note:

1. This is only exploitable if the IoBuffer#getObject method is called and a ProtocolCodecFilter instance using the ObjectSerializationCodecFactory class is added to the filter chain.

2. The FtpServer, SSHd and Vysper sub-project are not affected by this issue.

3. After upgrading to the fixed version, it is required to explicitly allow the classes the decoder will accept in the ObjectSerializationDecoder instance, using one of the three new methods: accept(ClassNameMatcher classNameMatcher), accept(Pattern pattern), or accept(String... patterns).

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.

• Apache Advisory
• GitHub Commit