Executive Summary

CVE-2018-15756 exposes Spring Framework (5.1, 5.0.x <5.0.10, 4.3.x <4.3.20, 4.2.x) to a denial‑of‑service attack via crafted HTTP Range headers. When serving static resources through ResourceHttpRequestHandler or annotated controllers returning org.springframework.core.io.Resource, an attacker can send many or overlapping ranges, exhausting server resources. Applications using spring-webmvc or spring-webflux, especially Spring Boot apps with default static resource handling, are vulnerable.

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Authoritative CVE Metadata - CVSS Base Score: 7.5 (HIGH) - Published: 2018-10-18T22:29:00.443 - Last Modified: 2026-08-25T16:28:27.310

Original Description: Spring Framework, version 5.1, versions 5.0.x prior to 5.0.10, versions 4.3.x prior to 4.3.20, and older unsupported versions on the 4.2.x branch provide support for range requests when serving static resources through the ResourceHttpRequestHandler, or starting in 5.0 when an annotated controller returns an org.springframework.core.io.Resource. A malicious user (or attacker) can add a range header with a high number of ranges, or with wide ranges that overlap, or both, for a denial of service attack. This vulnerability affects applications that depend on either spring-webmvc or spring-webflux. Such applications must also have a registration for serving static resources (e.g. JS, CSS, images, and others), or have an annotated controller that returns an org.springframework.core.io.Resource. Spring Boot applications that depend on spring-boot-starter-web or spring-boot-starter-webflux are ready to serve static resources out of the box and are therefore vulnerable.

"Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses."

— Alphonse Karr