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Fencer Intel
critical 9.8

CVE-2016-6814 in the critical feed json

Deserialization of Untrusted Data in Groovy

published 2018-01-18 8 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-xphj-m9cc-8fmq , EUVD-2022-5835

cvss
9.8
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
17.2%
EPSS 17.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 97%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

When an application with unsupported Codehaus versions of Groovy from 1.7.0 to 2.4.3, Apache Groovy 2.4.4 to 2.4.7 on classpath uses standard Java serialization mechanisms, e.g. to communicate between servers or to store local data, it was possible for an attacker to bake a special serialized object that will execute code directly when deserialized. All applications which rely on serialization and do not isolate the code which deserializes objects were subject to this vulnerability.

Patch / fix

  • maven org.codehaus.groovy:groovy 2.4.8
  • maven org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all 2.4.8
  • groovy Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 2.4.8-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2016-6814

  • groovy2 Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS 2.4.5-1ubuntu0.1~esm1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2016-6814

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • groovy RHEL 7 1.8.9-8.el7_4
  • groovy-javadoc RHEL 7 1.8.9-8.el7_4
  • rh-maven33-groovy RHEL 2 SOFTWARE_COLLECTIONS 1.8.9-7.19.el6
  • rh-maven33-groovy RHEL 2 SOFTWARE_COLLECTIONS 1.8.9-7.19.el7
  • rh-maven33-groovy-javadoc RHEL 2 SOFTWARE_COLLECTIONS 1.8.9-7.19.el6
  • rh-maven33-groovy-javadoc RHEL 2 SOFTWARE_COLLECTIONS 1.8.9-7.19.el7

red hat advisories RHSA-2017:2486RHSA-2017:2596

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2016-6814 updated cvss 9.6

Groovy: Remote code execution via deserialization

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3 jasperreports-server-pro
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat JBoss A-MQ 6 groovy
    affected: no fix available
  • Red Hat JBoss BRMS 5 groovy Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5 groovy
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat JBoss Fuse 6 camel Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works 6 camel
    affected: no fix available
  • Red Hat JBoss SOA Platform 5 groovy Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 2 jenkins
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat JBoss Portal 5 groovy
    under investigation
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client Optional (v. 7) groovy 1.8.9-8.el7_4, groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-8.el7_4 Red Hat Enterprise Linux ComputeNode Optional (v. 7) groovy 1.8.9-8.el7_4, groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-8.el7_4 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Optional (v. 7) groovy 1.8.9-8.el7_4, groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-8.el7_4 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation Optional (v. 7) groovy 1.8.9-8.el7_4, groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-8.el7_4
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2017:2486
  • Red Hat JBoss A-MQ 6.3
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2017:0868
show 4 more
  • Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization 6.3
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2017:0272
  • Red Hat JBoss Fuse 6.3
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2017:0868
  • Red Hat Software Collections for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 6) rh-maven33-groovy 1.8.9-7.19.el6, rh-maven33-groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-7.19.el6 Red Hat Software Collections for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 7) rh-maven33-groovy 1.8.9-7.19.el7, rh-maven33-groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-7.19.el7 Red Hat Software Collections for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server EUS (v. 6.7) rh-maven33-groovy 1.8.9-7.19.el6, rh-maven33-groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-7.19.el6 Red Hat Software Collections for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server EUS (v. 7.3) rh-maven33-groovy 1.8.9-7.19.el7, rh-maven33-groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-7.19.el7 Red Hat Software Collections for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation (v. 6) rh-maven33-groovy 1.8.9-7.19.el6, rh-maven33-groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-7.19.el6 Red Hat Software Collections for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation (v. 7) rh-maven33-groovy 1.8.9-7.19.el7, rh-maven33-groovy-javadoc 1.8.9-7.19.el7
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2017:2596
  • Red Hat JBoss Operations Network 3 groovy Red Hat Satellite 6 groovy
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

17.24% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 97% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 9.8 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.5 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
GitHub 3.0 9.8 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
maven org.codehaus.groovy:groovy
>=1.7.0, <2.4.8
2.4.8
maven org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all
>=1.7.0, <2.4.8
2.4.8

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-502 Deserialization of Untrusted Data

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.