CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-37578 — Apache Juddi security vulnerability

Critical CVSS 9.8

Apache jUDDI uses several classes related to Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) which (as an extension to UDDI) provides an alternate transport for accessing UDDI services. RMI uses the default Java serialization mechanism to pass parameters in RMI invocations. A remote attacker can send a malicious serialized object to the above RMI entries. The objects get deserialized without any check on the incoming data. In the worst case, it may let the attacker run arbitrary code remotely. For both jUDDI web service applications and jUDDI clients, the usage of RMI is disabled by default. Since this is an optional feature and an extension to the UDDI protocol, the likelihood of impact is low. Starting with 3.3.10, all RMI related code was removed.

Severity
Critical
CVSS
9.8 (3.1)
Published
2021-07-29
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
java/maven
Weaknesses
CWE-502

Affected products

  • apache / juddi

Matched remediation archetype

Unsafe deserialization and object reconstruction

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Check exposure

  • Inventory serialization formats accepted from requests, queues, caches, files, cookies, and cross-service messages.
  • Trace whether untrusted input can select classes, types, callbacks, constructors, or object hooks during decoding.
  • Identify signing, schema validation, trust-boundary, and compatibility settings for each decoder.

Remediate safely

  • Replace native object deserialization with a data-only format and explicit schema validation.
  • If replacement is not immediate, use a safe decoder with a minimal type allowlist and disable polymorphic or executable hooks.
  • Update the affected library and add inert tests for unknown types, extra fields, malformed nesting, and unsigned data.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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