WGSA-2022-00010

Java Spring Framework RCE aka Spring4Shell (CVE-2022-22965)

Informational Published 2022-03-30Updated 2026-07-28

Summary #

On 30 March 2022, details were leaked of a Spring Framework RCE that impacts Spring MVC and Spring WebFlux applications running on JDK 9+. The team at Spring released [a blog post](https://spring.io/blog/2022/03/31/spring-framework-rce-early-announcement) that documented the vulnerability. The exploit is commonly referenced as Spring4Shell.

Spring listed several conditions necessary to execute the exploit: - JDK 9 or higher - Spring Framework versions 5.3.0 to 5.3.17, 5.2.0 to 5.2.19, and older versions - Tomcat must run on the application as a WAR deployment - Deployed as a standalone Tomcat instance - spring-webmvc or spring-webflux dependency

The conditions listed are only documented known vectors of exploitation and are not limited to that list.

WatchGuard has reviewed all its products and services and so far, has determined that several of the services meet one but not all of the Spring Framework vulnerability requirements. We have yet to confirm exploitation against our products because they do not meet the necessary conditions.

CVE identifiers #

CVE IDDescriptionCVSS
CVE-2022-22965 A Spring MVC or Spring WebFlux application running on JDK 9+ may be vulnerable to remote code execution (RCE) via data binding. The specific exploit requires the application to run on Tomcat as a WAR deployment. If the application is deployed as a Spring Boot executable jar, i.e. the default, it is not vulnerable to the exploit. However, the nature of the vulnerability is more general, and there may be other ways to exploit it.

Product status #

ProductAffectedNot affected

Solution #

No solution has been published for this advisory.

Workaround #

The Firebox Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS) has signatures that detect and block these attacks: - 1230875 WEB Spring Cloud SpEL RCE (CVE-2022-22963) - 1230879 WEB Spring Core RCE -1 - 1230887 WEB Spring Core RCE -2 - 1230880 WEB VMware Spring Expression DoS Vulnerability (CVE-2022-22950) - 1230888 WEB Spring Core RCE -3 Update the IPS signatures on your Firebox to signature set v4.1270 and TDTS v18.205.

References #