GHSA-5qcv-4rpc-jp93 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.7) CWE-362 vulnerability in org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients. A fix is available for org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Apache Kafka Clients: Kafka Producer Message Corruption and Misrouting via Buffer Pool Race Condition
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- 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 GHSA-5qcv-4rpc-jp93.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-5qcv-4rpc-jp93 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,166 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients☕org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients☕org.apache.kafka:kafka-clientsReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Maven packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
A race condition in the Apache Kafka Java producer client’s buffer pool management can cause messages to be silently delivered to incorrect topics.
When a produce batch expires due to delivery.timeout.ms while a network request containing that batch is still in flight, the batch’s ByteBuffer is prematurely deallocated and returned to the buffer pool. If a subsequent producer batch—potentially destined for a different topic—reuses this freed buffer before the original network request completes, the buffer contents may become corrupted. This can result in messages being delivered to unintended topics without any error being reported to the producer.
Data Confidentiality: Messages intended for one topic may be delivered to a different topic, potentially exposing sensitive data to consumers who have access to the destination topic but not the intended source topic.
Data Integrity: Consumers on the receiving topic may encounter unexpected or incompatible messages, leading to deserialization failures, processing errors, and corrupted downstream data.
This issue affects Apache Kafka versions ≤ 3.9.1, ≤ 4.0.1, and ≤ 4.1.1.
Kafka users are advised to upgrade to 3.9.2, 4.0.2, 4.1.2, 4.2.0, or later to address this vulnerability.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| ☕Maven | org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients | ≥ 2.8.0&&< 3.9.2 | 3.9.2org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients:3.9.2 |
| ☕Maven | org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients | ≥ 4.0.0&&< 4.0.2 | 4.0.2org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients:4.0.2 |
| ☕Maven | org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients | ≥ 4.1.0&&< 4.1.2 | 4.1.2org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients:4.1.2 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients to 3.9.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-5qcv-4rpc-jp93 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like GHSA-5qcv-4rpc-jp93 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-5qcv-4rpc-jp93. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Build of Apache Camel 4.14 for Quarkus 3.27 | kafka-clients | RHSA-2026:13631 |
| Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4.18.1 for Spring Boot 3.5.14 | kafka-clients | RHSA-2026:17668 |
| Red Hat build of Quarkus 3.27.3.SP1 | kafka-clients | RHSA-2026:11721 |
| Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.0.5.GA | org.apache.kafka/kafka-clients:3.9.2.redhat-00001 | RHSA-2026:42098 |
| Streams for Apache Kafka 3.2.1 | kafka-clients | RHSA-2026:54435 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-5qcv-4rpc-jp93 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-5qcv-4rpc-jp93 across Maven dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.