Deserialization of Untrusted Data vulnerability in Apache ActiveMQ NMS OpenWire Client.
This issue affects Apache ActiveMQ NMS OpenWire Client before 2.1.1 when performing connections to untrusted servers. Such servers could abuse the unbounded deserialization in the client to provide malicious responses that may eventually cause arbitrary code execution on the client. Version 2.1.0 introduced a allow/denylist feature to restrict deserialization, but this feature could be bypassed.
The .NET team has deprecated the built-in .NET binary serialization feature starting with .NET 9 and suggests migrating away from binary serialization. The project is considering to follow suit and drop this part of the NMS API altogether.
Users are recommended to upgrade to version 2.1.1, which fixes the issue. We also recommend to migrate away from relying on .NET binary serialization as a hardening method for the future.
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.
It is often convenient to serialize objects for communication or to save them for later use. However, deserialized data or code can often be modified without using the provided accessor functions if it does not use cryptography to protect itself. Furthermore, any cryptography would still be client-side security – which is a dangerous security assumption. Data that is untrusted can not be trusted to be well-formed. When developers place no restrictions on “gadget chains,” or series of instances and method invocations that can self-execute during the deserialization process (i.e., before the object is returned to the caller), it is sometimes possible for attackers to leverage them to perform unauthorized actions, like generating a shell.