CVE-2026-55223
MediumCVSS 6.3Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk20th percentile — higher than 20% of all known CVEs
Summary
c3p0 versions prior to 0.14.0, when combined with other libraries, can act as a deserialization gadget sink. Attackers can craft malicious DataSource objects that, upon deserialization and automatic JavaBean property resolution, invoke vulnerable JDBC drivers, leading to remote code execution.
Risk Assessment
The organization is at risk of remote code execution (RCE) through deserialization of malicious data, potentially leading to application compromise and data breach.
Recommendation
Immediately upgrade c3p0 to version 0.14.0 or later, and review the classpath for vulnerable JDBC drivers and libraries such as commons-beanutils.
Original NVD description (English source)
c3p0 is a JDBC Connection pooling library. In versions prior to 0.14.0, c3p0 in combination with other libraries, can compose to a "sink" for deserialization gadgets. The JDBC spec's DataSource.getConnection() and ConnectionPoolDataSource.getPooledConnection() match the getXXX() form, so JavaBean libraries treat them as "properties" assumed safe while they actually call into JDBC drivers. Attackers can thus craft malicious DataSource objects whose property lookups invoke vulnerable drivers, then smuggle them in serialized form to where an application deserializes and auto-resolves bean properties — triggering the attack. This requires a susceptible DataSource/ConnectionPoolDataSource and JDBC driver on the CLASSPATH, plus a carrier that auto-looks-up JavaBean properties on = deserialization, most commonly a collection paired with an Apache commons-beanutils Comparator that sorts by bean properties. c3p0 supplied that susceptible DataSource/ConnectionPoolDataSource, which was an essential component of the trigger. This issue has been fixed in version 0.14.0.