Local Privilege Escalation within Spring Webflux Multipart Request Handling

MEDIUM | MAY 25, 2021 | CVE-2021-22118

Description

In Spring Framework, versions 5.2.x prior to 5.2.15 and versions 5.3.x prior to 5.3.7, a WebFlux application is vulnerable to a privilege escalation: by (re)creating the temporary storage directory, a locally authenticated malicious user can read or modify files that have been uploaded to the WebFlux application, or overwrite arbitrary files with multipart request data.

Spring MVC applications are not affected by this vulnerability, nor are applications that do not handle multipart file requests.

Affected Spring Products and Versions

Spring Framework:

  • 5.3.0 - 5.3.6
  • 5.2.0 - 5.2.14

Mitigation

Users of affected versions should upgrade to the corresponding fixed version.
Fix versionAvailability
5.3.7OSS
5.2.15OSS

No further mitigation steps are necessary.

Credit

This issue was identified and responsibly reported by Trung Pham from Viettel Cyber Security.

History

  • 2021-05-25: Initial vulnerability report published.

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