What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-11002: Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in dropwizard-validation

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 5.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-04-10 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-74

Description

dropwizard-validation before versions 2.0.3 and 1.3.21 has a remote code execution vulnerability. A server-side template injection was identified in the self-validating feature enabling attackers to inject arbitrary Java EL expressions, leading to Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability. If you are using a self-validating bean an upgrade to Dropwizard 1.3.21/2.0.3 or later is strongly recommended. The changes introduced in Dropwizard 1.3.19 and 2.0.2 for CVE-2020-5245 unfortunately did not fix the underlying issue completely. The issue has been fixed in dropwizard-validation 1.3.21 and 2.0.3 or later. We strongly recommend upgrading to one of these versions.

Affected products

• dropwizard: before 1.3.21; from 2.0.0 before 2.0.3 — fixed in 1.3.21, 2.0.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: dropwizard 1.3.21, 2.0.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/validator/6.1/reference/en-US/html_single/#section-hibernateconstraintvalidatorcontext
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/commit/d5a512f7abf965275f2a6b913ac4fe778e424242
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/pull/3208
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/pull/3209
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/security/advisories/GHSA-3mcp-9wr4-cjqf
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/security/advisories/GHSA-8jpx-m2wh-2v34
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/security/policy#reporting-a-vulnerability
• https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/validator/6.1/reference/en-US/html_single/#section-hibernateconstraintvalidatorcontext
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/commit/d5a512f7abf965275f2a6b913ac4fe778e424242
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/pull/3208
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/pull/3209
• https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/security/advisories/GHSA-3mcp-9wr4-cjqf

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