An issue was discovered in Pivotal Spring Security 4.2.0.RELEASE through 4.2.2.RELEASE, and Spring Security 5.0.0.M1. When configured to enable default typing, Jackson contained a deserialization vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution. Jackson fixed this vulnerability by blacklisting known "deserialization gadgets." Spring Security configures Jackson with global default typing enabled, which means that (through the previous exploit) arbitrary code could be executed if all of the following is true: (1) Spring Security's Jackson support is being leveraged by invoking SecurityJackson2Modules.getModules(ClassLoader) or SecurityJackson2Modules.enableDefaultTyping(ObjectMapper); (2) Jackson is used to deserialize data that is not trusted (Spring Security does not perform deserialization using Jackson, so this is an explicit choice of the user); and (3) there is an unknown (Jackson is not blacklisting it already) "deserialization gadget" that allows code execution present on the classpath. Jackson provides a blacklisting approach to protecting against this type of attack, but Spring Security should be proactive against blocking unknown "deserialization gadgets" when Spring Security enables default typing.

When using Spring Security's CAS Proxy ticket authentication a malicious CAS Service could trick another CAS Service into authenticating a proxy ticket that was not associated. This is due to the fact that the proxy ticket authentication uses the information from the HttpServletRequest which is populated based upon untrusted information within the HTTP request.

This means if there are access control restrictions on which CAS services can authenticate to one another, those restrictions can be bypassed.

If users are not using CAS Proxy tickets and not basing access control decisions based upon the CAS Service, then there is no impact to users.

Mitigation Users of affected versions should apply the following mitigation: - Users of 3.2x should upgrade to 3.2.5 or later - Users of 3.1.x should upgrade to 3.1.7 or later

Credit This issue was identified by David Ohsie and brought to our attention by the CAS Development team.

Missing Authorization When Using @AuthorizeReturnObject in Spring Security 6.3.0 and 6.3.1 allows attacker to render security annotations inaffective.

The ActiveDirectoryLdapAuthenticator in Spring Security 3.2.0 to 3.2.1 and 3.1.0 to 3.1.5 does not check the password length. If the directory allows anonymous binds then it may incorrectly authenticate a user who supplies an empty password.

The Spring Framework annotation detection mechanism may not correctly resolve annotations on methods within type hierarchies with a parameterized super type with unbounded generics. This can be an issue if such annotations are used for authorization decisions.

Your application may be affected by this if you are using Spring Security's @EnableMethodSecurity feature.

You are not affected by this if you are not using @EnableMethodSecurity or if you do not use security annotations on methods in generic superclasses or generic interfaces.

This CVE is published in conjunction with CVE-2025-41248 https://spring.io/security/cve-2025-41248 .

Pivotal Spring Security could provide weaker than expected security, caused by an insecure randomness flaw when using SecureRandomFactoryBean#setSeed to configure a SecureRandom instance. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to launch further attacks on the system.

Spring Security versions 5.3.x prior to 5.3.2, 5.2.x prior to 5.2.4, 5.1.x prior to 5.1.10, 5.0.x prior to 5.0.16 and 4.2.x prior to 4.2.16 use a fixed null initialization vector with CBC Mode in the implementation of the queryable text encryptor. A malicious user with access to the data that has been encrypted using such an encryptor may be able to derive the unencrypted values using a dictionary attack.

The spring-security.xsd file inside the spring-security-config jar is world writable which means that if it were extracted it could be written by anyone with access to the file system.

While there are no known exploits, this is an example of “CWE-732: Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource” and could result in an exploit. Users should update to the latest version of Spring Security to mitigate any future exploits found around this issue.