Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting org.apache.uima:uimaj-core package, versions [,3.5.0)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.07% (31st percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-JAVA-ORGAPACHEUIMA-6050328
  • published8 Nov 2023
  • disclosed8 Nov 2023
  • creditHuangzhicong

Introduced: 8 Nov 2023

CVE-2023-39913  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-502  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade org.apache.uima:uimaj-core to version 3.5.0 or higher.

Overview

org.apache.uima:uimaj-core is a core implementation of the UIMA Java Framework.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data through the CasIOUtils class. An attacker can execute arbitrary code by deserializing unverified Java objects. This is only exploitable if the user or developer has actively chosen to start a service that is remotely accessible, such as Vinci, or if they use the CasIOUtils in their own applications and services to parse untrusted serialized CAS data.

Workaround

This vulnerability can be mitigated by setting up a global or context-specific ObjectInputFilter if running UIMA on a Java version that supports it.

Note: Java 1.8 does not support the ObjectInputFilter, so there is no remedy when running on this out-of-support platform.

For Java 9+ platforms, a filter pattern can be configured through the jdk.serialFilter system property using a semicolon as a separator. It is strongly recommended to upgrade to a recent Java version if you need to secure a UIMA version that is affected by this issue.

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.

CVSS Scores

version 3.1