What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-42402: Apache Neethi: Policy Normalization Unbounded Resource Allocation DoS

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-05-01 · updated 2026-10-26
• Weakness: CWE-400

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

Affected products

• Apache Software Foundation Apache Neethi: before 3.2.2 — fixed in 3.2.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Apache Software Foundation Apache Neethi 3.2.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://lists.apache.org/thread/p826j0phhmr9f83wzpmys1y0bdfrr2q4
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/05/01/6

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