Vulnerability · Published Jan 17, 2020 · Assigned by pivotal

CVE-2020-5397CSRF Attack via CORS Preflight Requests with Spring MVC or Spring WebFlux

Medium 5.3

In plain English

A medium-severity cross-site request forgery in Spring Framework from Spring. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 2.6% (higher than 85% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.

Severity (CVSS 3.0)5.3Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)2.6%top 14.9% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsnot in CISA KEV
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Spring Framework, versions 5.2.x prior to 5.2.3 are vulnerable to CSRF attacks through CORS preflight requests that target Spring MVC (spring-webmvc module) or Spring WebFlux (spring-webflux module) endpoints. Only non-authenticated endpoints are vulnerable because preflight requests should not include credentials and therefore requests should fail authentication. However a notable exception to this are Chrome based browsers when using client certificates for authentication since Chrome sends TLS client certificates in CORS preflight requests in violation of spec requirements. No HTTP body can be sent or received as a result of this attack.

Affected packages & fixed versions

EcosystemPackageFixed inAdvisory
Mavenorg.springframework:spring-webflux5.2.3GHSA-7pm4-g2qj-j85x
Mavenorg.springframework:spring-webmvc5.2.3GHSA-7pm4-g2qj-j85x
Ubuntu:25.10libspring-javano fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2020-5397
Ubuntu:26.04:LTSlibspring-javano fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2020-5397
Ubuntu:26.10libspring-javano fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2020-5397

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
Spring Spring Framework 5.2 – before v5.2.3.RELEASE

Weakness: CWE-352 · Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

References