Description

Paths provided to the ResourceServlet were not properly sanitized and as a result exposed to directory traversal attacks.

Affected Spring Products and Versions

Spring Framework 4.3.0 to 4.3.4
Spring Framework 4.2.0 to 4.2.8
Spring Framework 3.2.0 to 3.2.17
Older unsupported versions are also affected

Mitigation

Users of affected versions should apply the following mitigation:

4.3.x users should upgrade to 4.3.5
4.2.x users should upgrade to 4.2.9
3.2.x users should upgrade to 3.2.18

Note that few applications are likely to use the ResourceServlet. It has been generally superseded since version 3.0 (circa 2009) by the ResourceHttpRequestHandler and related classes that have been in use by default and provide much more advanced capabilities, see “Serving Resources” in the reference documentation. The ResourceServlet is now deprecated in 3.2.x and 4.x and is removed altogether starting with version 5.

Credit

The issue was identified by Shumpei Asahara & Yuji Ito from NTT DATA Corporation and responsibly reported to Pivotal.

History

2016-12-21: Initial vulnerability report published

Reporting a vulnerability

The VMware Security Response team provides a single point of contact for the reporting of security vulnerabilities in VMware Tanzu products and coordinates the process of investigating any reported vulnerabilities.

To report a security vulnerability in a VMware service or product please refer to the VMware Security Response Policy.