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.

In Spring Framework versions 5.2.0 - 5.2.8, 5.1.0 - 5.1.17, 5.0.0 - 5.0.18, 4.3.0 - 4.3.28, and older unsupported versions, the protections against RFD attacks from CVE-2015-5211 may be bypassed depending on the browser used through the use of a jsessionid path parameter.

Spring Integration framework provides Kryo Codec implementations as an alternative for Java (de)serialization. When Kryo is configured with default options, all unregistered classes are resolved on demand. This leads to the "deserialization gadgets" exploit when provided data contains malicious code for execution during deserialization. In order to protect against this type of attack, Kryo can be configured to require a set of trusted classes for (de)serialization. Spring Integration should be proactive against blocking unknown "deserialization gadgets" when configuring Kryo in code.

Spring Framework, versions 5.2.x prior to 5.2.3 are vulnerable to CSRF attacks through CORS preflight requests that target Spring MVC (spring-webmvc module) or Spring WebFlux (spring-webflux module) endpoints. Only non-authenticated endpoints are vulnerable because preflight requests should not include credentials and therefore requests should fail authentication. However a notable exception to this are Chrome based browsers when using client certificates for authentication since Chrome sends TLS client certificates in CORS preflight requests in violation of spec requirements. No HTTP body can be sent or received as a result of this attack.

In Spring Framework, versions 5.2.x prior to 5.2.3, versions 5.1.x prior to 5.1.13, and versions 5.0.x prior to 5.0.16, an application is vulnerable to a reflected file download (RFD) attack when it sets a "Content-Disposition" header in the response where the filename attribute is derived from user supplied input.

Spring Web Services, versions 2.4.3, 3.0.4, and older unsupported versions of all three projects, were susceptible to XML External Entity Injection (XXE) when receiving XML data from untrusted sources.

Spring Framework, version 5.1, versions 5.0.x prior to 5.0.10, versions 4.3.x prior to 4.3.20, and older unsupported versions on the 4.2.x branch provide support for range requests when serving static resources through the ResourceHttpRequestHandler, or starting in 5.0 when an annotated controller returns an org.springframework.core.io.Resource. A malicious user (or attacker) can add a range header with a high number of ranges, or with wide ranges that overlap, or both, for a denial of service attack. This vulnerability affects applications that depend on either spring-webmvc or spring-webflux. Such applications must also have a registration for serving static resources (e.g. JS, CSS, images, and others), or have an annotated controller that returns an org.springframework.core.io.Resource. Spring Boot applications that depend on spring-boot-starter-web or spring-boot-starter-webflux are ready to serve static resources out of the box and are therefore vulnerable.

Spring Framework, versions 5.0.x prior to 5.0.7 and 4.3.x prior to 4.3.18 and older unsupported versions, allows web applications to enable cross-domain requests via JSONP (JSON with Padding) through AbstractJsonpResponseBodyAdvice for REST controllers and MappingJackson2JsonView for browser requests. Both are not enabled by default in Spring Framework nor Spring Boot, however, when MappingJackson2JsonView is configured in an application, JSONP support is automatically ready to use through the "jsonp" and "callback" JSONP parameters, enabling cross-domain requests.

The Java implementations of AMF3 deserializers in Pivotal/Spring Spring-flex derive class instances from java.io.Externalizable rather than the AMF3 specification's recommendation of flash.utils.IExternalizable. A remote attacker with the ability to spoof or control an RMI server connection may be able to send serialized Java objects that execute arbitrary code when deserialized.

Spring Framework, versions 5.0.x prior to 5.0.6, versions 4.3.x prior to 4.3.17, and older unsupported versions allows applications to expose STOMP over WebSocket endpoints with a simple, in-memory STOMP broker through the spring-messaging module. A malicious user (or attacker) can craft a message to the broker that can lead to a regular expression, denial of service attack.