CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-45105 — Apache Log4J security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.9

Apache Log4j2 versions 2.0-alpha1 through 2.16.0 (excluding 2.12.3 and 2.3.1) did not protect from uncontrolled recursion from self-referential lookups. This allows an attacker with control over Thread Context Map data to cause a denial of service when a crafted string is interpreted. This issue was fixed in Log4j 2.17.0, 2.12.3, and 2.3.1.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.9 (3.1)
Published
2021-12-18
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
java/maven
Weaknesses
CWE-20, CWE-674

Affected products

  • apache / log4j
  • netapp / cloud_manager
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 11.0
  • sonicwall / email_security
  • sonicwall / network_security_manager

Showing 6 representative product identities from 208 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.