CVE-2022-22965

CVE-2022-22965 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) vulnerability in VMware Spring Framework. CISA added it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on April 4, 2022, which means exploitation in the wild has been confirmed; US federal agencies had to remediate it by April 25, 2022. CISA does not currently list it as used in ransomware campaigns. VMware has 26 vulnerabilities in the KEV catalog, 9 of them linked to ransomware.

A Spring MVC or Spring WebFlux application running on JDK 9+ may be vulnerable to remote code execution (RCE) via data binding. The specific exploit requires the application to run on Tomcat as a WAR deployment. If the application is deployed as a Spring Boot executable jar, i.e. the default, it is not vulnerable to the exploit. However, the nature of the vulnerability is more general, and there may be other ways to exploit it.

CVSS vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/166713/Spring4Shell-Code-Execution.html
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/167011/Spring4Shell-Spring-Framework-Class-Property-Remote-Code-Execution.html
• https://cert-portal.siemens.com/productcert/pdf/ssa-254054.pdf
• https://psirt.global.sonicwall.com/vuln-detail/SNWLID-2022-0005
• https://tanzu.vmware.com/security/cve-2022-22965
• https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-java-spring-rce-Zx9GUc67
• https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuapr2022.html
• https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpujul2022.html