What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-41269: Unauthenticated remote code injection in cron-utils

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 4.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2021-11-15 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-94

Description

cron-utils is a Java library to define, parse, validate, migrate crons as well as get human readable descriptions for them. In affected versions A template Injection was identified in cron-utils enabling attackers to inject arbitrary Java EL expressions, leading to unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability. Versions up to 9.1.2 are susceptible to this vulnerability. Please note, that only projects using the @Cron annotation to validate untrusted Cron expressions are affected. The issue was patched and a new version was released. Please upgrade to version 9.1.6. There are no known workarounds known.

Affected products

• jmrozanec cron-utils: before 9.1.6 — fixed in 9.1.6

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: jmrozanec cron-utils 9.1.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/jmrozanec/cron-utils/commit/cfd2880f80e62ea74b92fa83474c2aabdb9899da
• https://github.com/jmrozanec/cron-utils/commit/d6707503ec2f20947f79e38f861dba93b39df9da
• https://github.com/jmrozanec/cron-utils/issues/461
• https://github.com/jmrozanec/cron-utils/security/advisories/GHSA-p9m8-27x8-rg87
• https://github.com/jmrozanec/cron-utils/commit/cfd2880f80e62ea74b92fa83474c2aabdb9899da
• https://github.com/jmrozanec/cron-utils/commit/d6707503ec2f20947f79e38f861dba93b39df9da
• https://github.com/jmrozanec/cron-utils/issues/461
• https://github.com/jmrozanec/cron-utils/security/advisories/GHSA-p9m8-27x8-rg87

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