Package Instance

Apache Log4j Core's XmlLayout fails to sanitize characters
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.

Apache Log4j 1.x (EOL) allows Denial of Service (DoS)
** UNSUPPORTED WHEN ASSIGNED ** When using the Chainsaw or SocketAppender components with Log4j 1.x on JRE less than 1.7, an attacker that manages to cause a logging entry involving a specially-crafted (ie deeply nested) hashmap or hashtable (depending on which logging component is in use) to be processed could exhaust the available memory in the virtual machine and achieve Denial of Service when the object is deserialized. This issue affects Apache Log4j before 2. Affected users are recommended to update to Log4j 2.x. NOTE: This vulnerability only affects products that are no longer supported by the maintainer.