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How To Detect and Secure Your Java App From Log4j Vulnerabilities

Apache Log4j is the popular open source logging library for Java developers that was recently caught up in a massive security-related breach. Due to its popularity, a large number of organizations were affected by the breach. For the latest news, refer to the official website about specific issues and patches. Here is an additional article that explains the core issues in detail.

List of Security Issues That Were Found in Log4j Version 2.x:

  1. CVE-2017-5645: Apache Log4j socket receiver deserialization vulnerability  (Severity - Moderate)
  2. CVE-2020-9488: Improper validation of certificate with host mismatch in Apache Log4j SMTP appender (Severity - Low)
  3. CVE-2021-44228: Apache Log4j2 JNDI features do not protect against attacker-controlled LDAP and other JNDI-related endpoints (Severity - Critical)
  4. CVE-2021-45046: Apache Log4j2 Thread Context Lookup Pattern vulnerable to remote code execution in certain non-default configurations (Severity - Critical)
  5. CVE-2021-45105: Apache Log4j2 does not always protect from infinite recursion in lookup evaluation (Severity - Critical)
  6. CVE-2021-44832: Apache Log4j2 vulnerable to RCE via JDBC Appender when attacker controls configuration (Severity - Moderate)

4 Ways To Secure Your Java Application:

1.  Detect if You Have Log4j 2.x in Your Code Base 

Apache Log4j can be in your project directly or a dependency of a dependency. Thus, it's best to use a build tool such as Maven or Gradle to quickly scan for the same tree as follows: