Listener stall via forged retry backoff header
Published Jun 9, 2026 · Updated Jun 9, 2026
Improper input validation in Spring for Apache Kafka allows remote authenticated users to stall Kafka listeners with forged retry headers. The retry topic infrastructure treats an out-of-range retry_topic-attempts value as a valid sequence position and accepts retry_topic_backoff-timestamp without bounds checking. The attacker must be able to produce records to a consumed Kafka topic; a crafted timestamp can pause the listener arbitrarily long, while a crafted attempt count disrupts retry routing.
Summary
What happened
Improper input validation in Spring for Apache Kafka allows remote authenticated users to stall Kafka listeners with forged retry headers. The retry topic infrastructure treats an out-of-range retry_topic-attempts value as a valid sequence position and accepts retry_topic_backoff-timestamp without bounds checking. The attacker must be able to produce records to a consumed Kafka topic; a crafted timestamp can pause the listener arbitrarily long, while a crafted attempt count disrupts retry routing.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2026-41727
- Published
- Jun 9, 2026
- Updated
- Jun 9, 2026
- Vendor
- Spring
- Product
- Spring for Apache Kafka
- Classifications
- CWE-20, T1499.004
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- authenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Jun 9, 2026CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Jun 9, 2026Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
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- Affected versionversion=2.8.0 <2.8.12
- Affected versionversion=2.9.0 <2.9.14
- Affected versionversion=3.2.0 <3.2.14
- Affected versionversion=3.3.0 <3.3.16
- Affected versionversion=4.0.0 <4.0.6
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
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.
Weakness, pattern, technique
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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