Apache CXF vulnerability (CVE-2021-22696) 

Issue date: 06-07-2021
Affects versions: 14.5, 13.4, 12.6

Security Issue ID

SECURITY-224

 

Affected Product Version(s)

14.5.1, 12.6.15, 13.4.8 and previous releases.


Severity 

high


Description

CVE-2021-22696

CXF supports (via JwtRequestCodeFilter) passing OAuth 2 parameters via a JWT token as opposed to query parameters (see: The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework: JWT Secured Authorization Request (JAR)). Instead of sending a JWT token as a "request" parameter, the spec also supports specifying a URI from which to retrieve a JWT token from via the "request_uri" parameter. CXF was not validating the "request_uri" parameter (apart from ensuring it uses "https) and was making a REST request to the parameter in the request to retrieve a token. This means that CXF was vulnerable to DDos attacks on the authorization server, as specified in section 10.4.1 of the spec. This issue affects Apache CXF versions prior to 3.4.3; Apache CXF versions prior to 3.3.10.

The Apache CXF dependency has been updated in 14.5.2, 13.4.9 and 12.6.16.

Instructions

Customers using the 12.x, 13.x and 14.x major versions are recommended to upgrade to the latest version in that series.