Severe, but no confirmed exploitation yet. Schedule remediation in your next patch cycle and apply mitigations if you're exposed.
An unauthenticated attacker, remotely over the network, with no user interaction, can fully compromise the system — steal data, tamper with it and take it offline.
A deserialization flaw was found in Apache Chainsaw versions prior to 2.1.0 which could lead to malicious code execution.
Inferred from the weakness type (CWE) and how the flaw is reached — the techniques an attacker would chain to exploit this. Real-world corroboration appears here as threat intel is folded in.
Generated by Wavense from the CVE record — an immediate mitigation and the permanent fix.
Other CVEs affecting chainsaw
Apache Log4j2 2.0-beta9 through 2.15.0 (excluding security releases 2.12.2, 2.12.3, and 2.3.1) JNDI features used in configuration, log messages, and parameters do not protect against attacker controlled LDAP and other JNDI related endpoints. An attacker who can control log messages or log message parameters can execute arbitrary code loaded from LDAP servers when message lookup substitution is enabled. From log4j 2.15.0, this behavior has been disabled by default. From version 2.16.0 (along with 2.12.2, 2.12.3, and 2.3.1), this functionality has been completely removed. Note that this vulnerability is specific to log4j-core and does not affect log4net, log4cxx, or other Apache Logging Services projects.
It was found that the fix to address CVE-2021-44228 in Apache Log4j 2.15.0 was incomplete in certain non-default configurations. This could allows attackers with control over Thread Context Map (MDC) input data when the logging configuration uses a non-default Pattern Layout with either a Context Lookup (for example, $${ctx:loginId}) or a Thread Context Map pattern (%X, %mdc, or %MDC) to craft malicious input data using a JNDI Lookup pattern resulting in an information leak and remote code execution in some environments and local code execution in all environments. Log4j 2.16.0 (Java 8) and 2.12.2 (Java 7) fix this issue by removing support for message lookup patterns and disabling JNDI functionality by default.
In Apache Log4j 2.x before 2.8.2, when using the TCP socket server or UDP socket server to receive serialized log events from another application, a specially crafted binary payload can be sent that, when deserialized, can execute arbitrary code.
Apache Log4j Core's XmlLayout https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/layouts.html#XmlLayout , in versions up to and including 2.25.3, fails to sanitize characters forbidden by the XML 1.0 specification https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#charsets producing invalid XML output whenever a log message or MDC value contains such characters. The impact depends on the StAX implementation in use: * JRE built-in StAX: Forbidden characters are silently written to the output, producing malformed XML. Conforming parsers must reject such documents with a fatal error, which may cause downstream log-processing systems to drop the affected records. * Alternative StAX implementations (e.g., Woodstox https://github.com/FasterXML/woodstox , a transitive dependency of the Jackson XML Dataformat module): An exception is thrown during the logging call, and the log event is never delivered to its intended appender, only to Log4j's internal status logger. Users are advised to upgrade to Apache Log4j Core 2.25.4, which corrects this issue by sanitizing forbidden characters before XML output.
The Log4j1XmlLayout from the Apache Log4j 1-to-Log4j 2 bridge fails to escape characters forbidden by the XML 1.0 standard, producing malformed XML output. Conforming XML parsers are required to reject documents containing such characters with a fatal error, which may cause downstream log processing systems to drop or fail to index affected records. Two groups of users are affected: * Those using Log4j1XmlLayout directly in a Log4j Core 2 configuration file. * Those using the Log4j 1 configuration compatibility layer with org.apache.log4j.xml.XMLLayout specified as the layout class. Users are advised to upgrade to Apache Log4j 1-to-Log4j 2 bridge version 2.25.4, which corrects this issue. Note: The Apache Log4j 1-to-Log4j 2 bridge is deprecated and will not be present in Log4j 3. Users are encouraged to consult the Log4j 1 to Log4j 2 migration guide https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/migrate-from-log4j1.html , and specifically the section on eliminating reliance on the bridge.
Apache Log4j Core's Rfc5424Layout https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/layouts.html#RFC5424Layout , in versions 2.21.0 through 2.25.3, is vulnerable to log injection via CRLF sequences due to undocumented renames of security-relevant configuration attributes. Two distinct issues affect users of stream-based syslog services who configure Rfc5424Layout directly: * The newLineEscape attribute was silently renamed, causing newline escaping to stop working for users of TCP framing (RFC 6587), exposing them to CRLF injection in log output. * The useTlsMessageFormat attribute was silently renamed, causing users of TLS framing (RFC 5425) to be silently downgraded to unframed TCP (RFC 6587), without newline escaping. Users of the SyslogAppender are not affected, as its configuration attributes were not modified. Users are advised to upgrade to Apache Log4j Core 2.25.4, which corrects this issue.
Apache Log4j's JsonTemplateLayout https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/json-template-layout.html , in versions up to and including 2.25.3, produces invalid JSON output when log events contain non-finite floating-point values (NaN, Infinity, or -Infinity), which are prohibited by RFC 8259. This may cause downstream log processing systems to reject or fail to index affected records. An attacker can exploit this issue only if both of the following conditions are met: * The application uses JsonTemplateLayout. * The application logs a MapMessage, or logs an object directly (e.g., via Logger.info(Object), which wraps it in an ObjectMessage), where the message contains an attacker-controlled floating-point value. Users are advised to upgrade to Apache Log4j JSON Template Layout 2.25.4, which corrects this issue. Note: The fix released in version 2.25.4 did not cover all affected code paths. CVE-2026-49844 was assigned to the remaining issue, which concerns the MapMessage.asJson() serialization in Apache Log4j API and is fixed in versions 2.25.5 and 2.26.1.
The fix for CVE-2025-68161 https://logging.apache.org/security.html#CVE-2025-68161 was incomplete: it addressed hostname verification only when enabled via the log4j2.sslVerifyHostName https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/systemproperties.html#log4j2.sslVerifyHostName system property, but not when configured through the verifyHostName https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/appenders/network.html#SslConfiguration-attr-verifyHostName attribute of the element. Although the verifyHostName configuration attribute was introduced in Log4j Core 2.12.0, it was silently ignored in all versions through 2.25.3, leaving TLS connections vulnerable to interception regardless of the configured value. A network-based attacker may be able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack when all of the following conditions are met: * An SMTP, Socket, or Syslog appender is in use. * TLS is configured via a nested element. * The attacker can present a certificate issued by a CA trusted by the appender's configured trust store, or by the default Java trust store if none is configured. This issue does not affect users of the HTTP appender, which uses a separate verifyHostname https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/appenders/network.html#HttpAppender-attr-verifyHostName attribute that was not subject to this bug and verifies host names by default. Users are advised to upgrade to Apache Log4j Core 2.25.4, which corrects this issue.