Overview
This is the version of an Apereo CAS project vulnerability disclosure, describing an issue in CAS that results in an RCE vulnerability in the Spring framework.
For additional details on how security issues, patches and announcements are handled, please read the Apereo CAS project vulnerability disclosure process.
Affected Deployments
The security issue described here, per the CAS maintenance policy, affects the Apereo CAS server for the following versions:
- 6.4.x
- 6.5.x
If your CAS version is not listed above AND is still part of an active maintenance cycle per the CAS maintenance policy, then best effort (analysis or confirmation from reporters/testers) indicates that the version is not affected by this issue. That said, please note that per the project’s Apache2 license, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.. For additional information, please see the project license.
If you or your institution is a member of the Apereo foundation with an active support subscription supporting the CAS project, please contact the CAS subs working group to learn more about this security vulnerability report.
Severity
The specific exploit requires the CAS application to run on Tomcat as a WAR deployment. If CAS 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.
Follow-up: see this
Timeline
The issue was originally reported on March 30th, 2022 and upon confirmation, CAS releases were patched on March 31st, 2022 and released on the same day.
Patching
Patch releases are available to address CAS deployments. Upgrades to the next patch version for each release should be a drop-in replacement.
Procedure
6.4.x
Modify your CAS overlay to point to the version 6.4.6.3.
6.5.x
Modify your CAS overlay to point to the version 6.5.3.
Support
Apereo CAS is Apache v2 open source software under the sponsorship of the Apereo Foundation, supported by community volunteers and enthusiasts. Support options may be found here.
If you or your institution is a member of the Apereo foundation with an active subscription supporting the CAS project, please contact the CAS subs working group to learn more about this security vulnerability report.
Resources
On behalf of the CAS Application Security working group,