Service interruption via cacheable welcome-page 404 responses
Published May 26, 2023 · Updated Jan 16, 2025
Denial of service in Spring Boot allows remote attackers to interrupt access to a welcome page through a caching reverse proxy. WelcomePageHandlerMapping declines requests whose Accept header excludes text/html, letting fallback resource handling return a cacheable 404 for the root path instead of 406. Exploitation requires Spring MVC auto-configuration, static or templated welcome-page support, and a proxy that caches 404 responses, allowing a crafted request to deny the cached root page to later clients.
Summary
What happened
Denial of service in Spring Boot allows remote attackers to interrupt access to a welcome page through a caching reverse proxy. WelcomePageHandlerMapping declines requests whose Accept header excludes text/html, letting fallback resource handling return a cacheable 404 for the root path instead of 406. Exploitation requires Spring MVC auto-configuration, static or templated welcome-page support, and a proxy that caches 404 responses, allowing a crafted request to deny the cached root page to later clients.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2023-20883
- Published
- May 26, 2023
- Updated
- Jan 16, 2025
- Vendor
- Spring
- Product
- Spring Boot
- Classifications
- CWE-400, T1499
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- unauthenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- May 26, 2023CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Jan 16, 2025Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=Spring Boot versions 3.0.0 - 3.0.6, 2.7.0 - 2.7.11, 2.6.0 - 2.6.14, 2.5.0 - 2.5.14 and older unsupported versions
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Published CVSS scores
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Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Public exploit references
No public exploit references are available in this record.
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Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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