Security and CVE Tracking

This page tracks known vulnerabilities (CVEs) for Apache Neethi.

For reporting a new vulnerability, see Apache Security Team.

Apache Neethi CVEs

• CVE-2026-66144: Apache Neethi: Remote PolicyReference fetch lacks resource bounds
  • Severity: Low
  • Affected versions:

    - Apache Neethi (org.apache.neethi:neethi) before 3.2.3

  • Description:

    Although remote policy references are not retrieved during policy normalization, if they are manually retrieved via the API it can cause a denial of service attack if a huge policy is retrieved. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 3.2.3, which fixes this issue by imposing a default maximum size on data read from remote policy references.

  • Credit:

    Reported by LTSHFWJT (finder)

• CVE-2026-66143: Apache Neethi: Missing global alternative-output budget across policy computation paths
  • Severity: Moderate
  • Affected versions:

    - Apache Neethi (org.apache.neethi:neethi) before 3.2.3

  • Description:

    It is possible to bypass the maximum number of normalized policy alternatives that was introduced in Apache Neethi 3.2.2 via certain crafted policies, which may lead to a denial of service attack via resource consumption. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 3.2.3, which fixes this issue.

  • Credit:

    Reported by LTSHFWJT (finder)

• CVE-2026-66142: Apache Neethi: Uncontrolled recursion in policy processing
  • Severity: Moderate
  • Affected versions:

    - Apache Neethi (org.apache.neethi:neethi) before 3.2.3

  • Description:

    Apache Neethi is vulnerable to uncontrolled recursion when parsing policies that lack policy Ids or with deeply nested structures, which may lead to a denial of service attack when parsing policies due to runtime memory exhaustion. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 3.2.3, which fixes this issue.

  • Credit:

    Reported by LTSHFWJT (finder)

• CVE-2026-42404: Apache Neethi: Unrestricted HTTP Redirect Following in Policy References
  • Severity: Medium
  • Description:

    Apache Neethi does not impose restrictions on URIs when manually fetching remote policy references through the PolicyReference API. When an application explicitly calls this API to retrieve a policy from a remote URI, an outbound request may be made for arbitrary protocols and internal IP addresses.

    From 3.2.2, only http or https URIs are allowed, and link-local, multicast, and any-local addresses are forbidden.

  • Recommendation:

    Users should upgrade to Apache Neethi 3.2.2 or later.

• CVE-2026-42403: Apache Neethi: Circular Policy Reference Infinite Loop
  • Severity: High
  • Description:

    Apache Neethi does not properly detect circular references in policy definitions. When a WS-Policy document contains circular policy references (where Policy A references Policy B which references Policy A), the policy normalization process can enter an infinite loop or cause excessive recursion, leading to a stack overflow or application hang. An attacker can craft malicious policy documents with circular references to cause a Denial of Service condition

  • Recommendation:

    Users should upgrade to Apache Neethi 3.2.2 or later.

• CVE-2026-42402: Apache Neethi: Policy Normalization Unbounded Resource Allocation DoS
  • Severity: High
  • Description:

    Apache Neethi is vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack through algorithmic complexity in policy normalization. Specially crafted WS-Policy documents can trigger an exponential Cartesian cross-product expansion during the normalization process, causing unbounded memory allocation that exhausts the JVM heap. This occurs when the normalization process generates an excessive number of policy alternatives without bounds, leading to runtime memory exhaustion.

  • Recommendation:

    Users should upgrade to 3.2.2 which limits the maximum number of normalized policy alternatives.