CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-6809

Deserialization of Untrusted Data

Published: Apr 06, 2017 | Modified: Apr 20, 2025
CVSS 3.x
9.8
CRITICAL
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.x
7.5 HIGH
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
RedHat/V2
5.1 MODERATE
AV:N/AC:H/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
RedHat/V3
7.8 MODERATE
CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Ubuntu
MEDIUM

Apache Tika before 1.14 allows Java code execution for serialized objects embedded in MATLAB files. The issue exists because Tika invokes JMatIO to do native deserialization.

Weakness

The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently ensuring that the resulting data will be valid.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Nutch Apache 2.3.1 (including) 2.3.1 (including)
Tika Apache * 1.13 (including)
Tika Ubuntu upstream *

Potential Mitigations

  • Make fields transient to protect them from deserialization.
  • An attempt to serialize and then deserialize a class containing transient fields will result in NULLs where the transient data should be. This is an excellent way to prevent time, environment-based, or sensitive variables from being carried over and used improperly.

References