CVE-2026-66144
HighCVSS 7.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk25th percentile - higher than 25% of all known CVEs
Summary
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.
Risk Assessment
An attacker can cause service unavailability by requesting a huge policy, leading to system overload.
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-2026-66143High
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.
- CVE-2026-66142High
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.
Original NVD description (English source)
Although remote policy references are not retrieved during policy normalization, if they are manually retrieved via the API it can cause a denial of service attack if a huge policy is retrieved. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 3.2.3, which fixes this issue by imposing a default maximum size on data read from remote policy references.