Why SolarWinds DPA is not affected by a path traversal vulnerability in functional web frameworks (CVE-2024-38816 and CVE-2024-38819)

In 2024, Spring published a description of the following CVEs:

• CVE-2024-38816

  Applications serving static resources through the functional web frameworks WebMvc.fn or WebFlux.fn are vulnerable to path traversal attacks. An attacker can craft malicious HTTP requests and obtain any file on the file system that is also accessible to the process in which the Spring application is running.

  Specifically, an application is vulnerable when both of the following are true:

  • The web application uses RouterFunctions to serve static resources.
  • Resource handling is explicitly configured with a FileSystemResource location.

  However, malicious requests are blocked and rejected when any of the following is true:

  • The Spring Security HTTP Firewall is in use.
  • The application runs on Tomcat or Jetty

• CVE-2024-38819

  This is similar to CVE-2024-38816, but with different input.

CVE-2024-38816 and CVE-2024-38819

DPA is not affected by CVE-2024-38816 because the application runs on Tomcat. DPA does not use the RouterFunctions feature, which is required for it to be affected by CVE-2024-38819.

Reference links:

CVE-2024-38816: Path traversal vulnerability in functional web frameworks

CVE-2024-38819: Path traversal vulnerability in functional web frameworks (2nd report)