Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity via the patterns for disallowedFields on a DataBinder. As a result, a field is not effectively protected unless it is listed with both upper and lower case for the first character of the field, including nested fields within the property path.

Remediation

Upgrade org.springframework:spring-context to version 5.2.21, 5.3.19 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• PoC
• Spring Blog Post
• Tanzu Advisory

Overview

org.springframework:spring-web is a package that provides a comprehensive programming and configuration model for modern Java-based enterprise applications - on any kind of deployment platform.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). A malicious user could add a range header with a high number of ranges, or with wide ranges that overlap, or both, for a denial of service attack.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

• A The string must start with the letter 'A'
• (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
• D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

1. CCC
2. CC+C
3. C+CC
4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade org.springframework:spring-web to version 4.3.20.RELEASE, 5.0.10.RELEASE, 5.1.1.RELEASE or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• Pivotal Security Report

Overview

junit:junit is an unit testing framework for Java

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Information Exposure. The JUnit4 test rule TemporaryFolder contains a local information disclosure vulnerability. On Unix like systems, the system's temporary directory is shared between all users on that system. Because of this, when files and directories are written into this directory they are, by default, readable by other users on that same system.

Note: This vulnerability does not allow other users to overwrite the contents of these directories or files. This only affects Unix like systems.

Remediation

Upgrade junit:junit to version 4.13.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• POC: GitHub Advisory

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity due to String.toLowerCase() having some Locale dependent exceptions that could potentially result in fields not protected as expected.

Note:

The fix for CVE-2022-22968 made disallowedFields patterns in DataBinder case insensitive.

This vulnerability was also fixed in commercial versions 5.3.41 and 6.0.25.

Remediation

Upgrade org.springframework:spring-context to version 6.1.14 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• Spring Security Advisory

Overview

org.springframework:spring-core is a core package within the spring-framework that contains multiple classes and utilities.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity due to String.toLowerCase() having some Locale dependent exceptions that could potentially result in fields not protected as expected.

Note:

The fix for CVE-2022-22968 made disallowedFields patterns in DataBinder case insensitive.

This vulnerability was also fixed in commercial versions 5.3.41 and 6.0.25.

Remediation

Upgrade org.springframework:spring-core to version 6.1.14 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• Spring Security Advisory

Overview

org.springframework:spring-web is a package that provides a comprehensive programming and configuration model for modern Java-based enterprise applications - on any kind of deployment platform.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity due to String.toLowerCase() having some Locale dependent exceptions that could potentially result in fields not protected as expected.

Note:

The fix for CVE-2022-22968 made disallowedFields patterns in DataBinder case insensitive.

This vulnerability was also fixed in commercial versions 5.3.41 and 6.0.25.

Remediation

Upgrade org.springframework:spring-web to version 6.1.14 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• Spring Security Advisory