CVE-2026-66142
HighCVSS 7.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk25th percentile - higher than 25% of all known CVEs
Summary
Uncontrolled recursion vulnerability in Apache Neethi when parsing policies without IDs or with deeply nested structures, leading to DoS via memory exhaustion. Fixed in version 3.2.3.
Risk Assessment
An attacker can cause system crash due to memory exhaustion by sending specially crafted policies.
Recommendation
Upgrade Apache Neethi to version 3.2.3 or later.
Other vulnerabilities in Apache Neethi
See all- CVE-2026-42403High
Apache Neethi does not properly detect circular references in policy definitions. Circular references in WS-Policy documents can lead to an infinite loop or excessive recursion, resulting in a stack overflow or application hang.
- CVE-2026-42402High
Apache Neethi is vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack due to algorithmic complexity in policy normalization. Specially crafted WS-Policy documents can trigger an exponential Cartesian cross-product expansion during the normalization process, leading to unbounded memory allocation and JVM heap exhaustion.
- CVE-2026-66144High
Denial of service vulnerability in Apache Neethi when manually retrieving remote policy references via API. Retrieving a huge policy can cause resource exhaustion. Fixed in version 3.2.3 by imposing a default maximum data size.
- CVE-2026-66143High
Bypass of the maximum number of normalized policy alternatives in Apache Neethi 3.2.2 via crafted policies, potentially leading to DoS via resource consumption. Fixed in version 3.2.3.
Original NVD description (English source)
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.