CVE-2025-68161

The Socket Appender in Apache Log4j Core versions 2.0-beta9 through 2.25.2 does not perform TLS hostname verification of the peer certificate, even when the verifyHostName https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/appenders/network.html#SslConfiguration-attr-verifyHostName configuration attribute or the log4j2.sslVerifyHostName https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/systemproperties.html#log4j2.sslVerifyHostName system property is set to true.

This issue may allow a man-in-the-middle attacker to intercept or redirect log traffic under the following conditions:

The attacker is able to intercept or redirect network traffic between the client and the log receiver.
The attacker can present a server certificate issued by a certification authority trusted by the Socket Appender’s configured trust store (or by the default Java trust store if no custom trust store is configured).

Users are advised to upgrade to Apache Log4j Core version 2.25.3, which addresses this issue.

As an alternative mitigation, the Socket Appender may be configured to use a private or restricted trust root to limit the set of trusted certificates.

References

Affected packages

Git / github.com/apache/logging-log4j2

Affected ranges

Type

GIT

Repo

https://github.com/apache/logging-log4j2

Events

Introduced

6b788facd3479dfe9052b3a5e13f6603dce8c16f

Fixed

028e9fad03ae7bcbf2e49ab8d32d8cfb900f3587

Introduced

Last affected

8d9204a4b4c6016fa6b36513a46502689d6a45c1

Database specific

{
    "versions": [
        {
            "introduced": "2.0.1"
        },
        {
            "fixed": "2.25.3"
        },
        {
            "introduced": "0"
        },
        {
            "last_affected": "2.0-NA"
        }
    ]
}

Database specific

unresolved_ranges

[
    {
        "events": [
            {
                "introduced": "0"
            },
            {
                "last_affected": "2.0-beta9"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "events": [
            {
                "introduced": "0"
            },
            {
                "last_affected": "2.0-rc1"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "events": [
            {
                "introduced": "0"
            },
            {
                "last_affected": "2.0-rc1\\-rc1"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "events": [
            {
                "introduced": "0"
            },
            {
                "last_affected": "2.0-rc2"
            }
        ]
    }
]

source

"https://storage.googleapis.com/cve-osv-conversion/osv-output/CVE-2025-68161.json"