Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting org.springframework.kafka:spring-kafka package, versions [2.8.1,2.9.11)[3.0.0,3.0.10)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Proof of Concept
EPSS
25.6% (96th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-JAVA-ORGSPRINGFRAMEWORKKAFKA-5855818
  • published24 Aug 2023
  • disclosed23 Aug 2023
  • creditJoseph Beeton

Introduced: 23 Aug 2023

CVE-2023-34040  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-502  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade org.springframework.kafka:spring-kafka to version 2.9.11, 3.0.10 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data when improperly configured. In order to exploit this vulnerability a local attacker would have to construct a malicious serialized object in one of the deserialization exception record headers.

Specifically, an application is vulnerable when all of the following are true:

  1. The user does not configure an ErrorHandlingDeserializer for the key and/or value of the record.

  2. The user explicitly sets container properties checkDeserExWhenKeyNull and/or checkDeserExWhenValueNull container properties to true.

  3. The user allows untrusted sources to publish to a Kafka topic.

Note: By default, these properties are false, and the container only attempts to deserialize the headers if an ErrorHandlingDeserializer is configured. The ErrorHandlingDeserializer prevents the vulnerability by removing any such malicious headers before processing the record.

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 Base Scores

version 3.1