A specially crafted pair of WS-Policy documents can force Neethi's policy-intersection to do exponential amounts of work, pinning the CPU for a long time (denial of service).
A small WS-Policy document using repeated policy references can force Neethi to re-expand the same references exponentially during normalization, consuming huge amounts of CPU and memory (denial of service).
A specially crafted WS-Policy document can pack unlimited content inside a policy assertion, which Neethi copies into memory without counting it against its size limits, exhausting the heap (denial of service).
A specially crafted WS-Policy document with deeply nested policy elements can bypass Neethi's nesting-depth limit and exhaust the thread stack, crashing the parser (denial of service).
Although remote policy references are not retrieved during policy normalization, if they are manually retrieved via the API it can cause a denial of service attack if a huge policy is retrieved.
CVSS 3.1HIGH 7.5·Network·No auth·No interaction·EPSS 0.0074·Published 2026-07-24·Fixed in 3.2.3CWE-400
It is possible to bypass the maximum number of normalized policy alternatives that was introduced in Apache Neethi 3.2.2 via certain crafted policies, which may lead to a denial of service attack via resource consumption…
Apache Neethi is vulnerable to uncontrolled recursion when parsing policies that lack policy Ids or with deeply nested structures, which may lead to a denial of service attack when parsing policies due to runtime memory…
CVSS 3.1HIGH 7.5·Network·No auth·No interaction·EPSS 0.0074·Published 2026-07-24·Fixed in 3.2.3CWE-400
When Neethi fetches a remote policy reference, it only limits the time per read, not the whole transfer, so a server that trickles bytes slowly can keep the fetch alive indefinitely and tie up the calling thread (denial…
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 4.3·Network·No auth·User interaction·EPSS 0.00497·Published 2026-09-21·Fixed in 3.2.4CWE-400