Impact
A header value supplied by an inbound consumer record is parsed directly into a BigInteger without any validation on length or format. This flaw can cause an application to enter an uncontrolled retry loop, consuming CPU and memory resources and potentially exhausting them, resulting in denial of service. The weakness lies in improper input validation during message processing.
Affected Systems
The affected products are Spring for Apache Kafka releases 4.1.0 and 4.0.0 through 4.0.6, 3.0.0 through 3.3.16, 2.9.0 through 2.9.14, and all 2.8.12 versions and earlier.
Risk and Exploitability
The CVSS score of 6.5 indicates a moderate severity. The EPSS score is not available, and the vulnerability is not listed in the KEV catalog. Attackers can exploit the flaw by crafting a message with a malicious "retry_topic-original-timestamp" header and sending it to a consumer instance that uses DeadLetterPublishingRecovererFactory. Based on the description, the likely attack vector is through network access that allows message production to the Kafka broker used by the vulnerable consumer.
OpenCVE Enrichment