CVE-2026-66142 — ws-neethi
HIGHCVE-2026-66142 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Apache Neethi: Uncontrolled recursion in policy processing
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-66142.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-66142 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 380,526 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
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 exhaustion. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 3.2.3, which fixes this issue.
Affected Products
neethiapacheDetection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Fix
Upgrade the affected component to the fixed release for CVE-2026-66142, or apply your distribution's backported patch — distro builds are often patched at an older version number, so check your vendor's advisory rather than the upstream version alone.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-66142 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.