Apache Camel: bypass/injection (CVE-2025-27636) #shorts

Summary

Welcome to our latest podcast episode. Today, we're diving into a critical security vulnerability affecting a widely-used software – Apache Camel. The vulnerability we're focusing on is identified as CVE-2025-27636. It was published in March 2025 and involves bypass and injection issues in Apache Camel's header filtering strategy. Stay tuned as we break down what this means, who is affected, and what steps you can take to protect your systems.

Product details

Apache Camel is an open-source framework that empowers developers to integrate different systems using a variety of transport protocols and APIs. It's widely adopted for its flexibility and ease of use. However, versions up to 3.22.3, 4.8.4, and 4.10.1 have been found to be vulnerable due to an issue with their Default Header Filtering mechanism.

Vulnerability type summary

CVE-2025-27636 is classified as a bypass and injection vulnerability. This type of vulnerability occurs when input is not properly filtered or sanitized, allowing attackers to inject malicious headers or bypass existing security checks, potentially leading to unauthorized behaviors.

Details of the vulnerability

This vulnerability arises from a bug in Apache Camel's default filtering mechanism for headers. Essentially, headers not starting with 'Camel', 'camel', or 'org.apache.camel.' are not properly filtered, allowing attackers to inject custom headers. This can alter behaviors in Camel components like camel-bean or camel-jms, allowing them to invoke methods or redirect messages to unintended destinations. Notably, Camel components facing directly to the internet using HTTP protocols are particularly at risk, with components like camel-servlet, camel-jetty, camel-undertow, camel-platform-http, and camel-netty-http being vulnerable out of the box. To mitigate this, users are advised to upgrade to safer versions: 4.10.2 for 4.10.x, 4.8.5 for 4.8.x, and 3.22.4 for the 3.x release lines.

Conclusion

In conclusion, CVE-2025-27636 presents a significant risk to systems using vulnerable versions of Apache Camel. Users should act immediately by updating to the recommended versions and applying header filtering within their Camel routes using the removeHeaders EIP. As always, staying informed and updating regularly can mitigate the risks posed by such vulnerabilities. Be sure to tune into our future episodes for more updates on cybersecurity news.

Watch the full video on YouTube: CVE-2025-27636

Remediation and exploitation details

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This following systems are involved

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CVE database technical details

CVE ID

CVE-2025-27636

Description

Bypass/Injection vulnerability in Apache Camel components under particular conditions. This issue affects Apache Camel: from 4.10.0 through <= 4.10.1, from 4.8.0 through <= 4.8.4, from 3.10.0 through <= 3.22.3. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 4.10.2 for 4.10.x LTS, 4.8.5 for 4.8.x LTS and 3.22.4 for 3.x releases. This vulnerability is present in Camel's default incoming header filter, that allows an attacker to include Camel specific headers that for some Camel components can alter the behaviours such as the camel-bean component, to call another method on the bean, than was coded in the application. In the camel-jms component, then a malicious header can be used to send the message to another queue (on the same broker) than was coded in the application. This could also be seen by using the camel-exec component The attacker would need to inject custom headers, such as HTTP protocols. So if you have Camel applications that are directly connected to the internet via HTTP, then an attacker could include malicious HTTP headers in the HTTP requests that are send to the Camel application. All the known Camel HTTP component such as camel-servlet, camel-jetty, camel-undertow, camel-platform-http, and camel-netty-http would be vulnerable out of the box. In these conditions an attacker could be able to forge a Camel header name and make the bean component invoking other methods in the same bean. In terms of usage of the default header filter strategy the list of components using that is: * camel-activemq * camel-activemq6 * camel-amqp * camel-aws2-sqs * camel-azure-servicebus * camel-cxf-rest * camel-cxf-soap * camel-http * camel-jetty * camel-jms * camel-kafka * camel-knative * camel-mail * camel-nats * camel-netty-http * camel-platform-http * camel-rest * camel-sjms * camel-spring-rabbitmq * camel-stomp * camel-tahu * camel-undertow * camel-xmpp The vulnerability arises due to a bug in the default filtering mechanism that only blocks headers starting with "Camel", "camel", or "org.apache.camel.". Mitigation: You can easily work around this in your Camel applications by removing the headers in your Camel routes. There are many ways of doing this, also globally or per route. This means you could use the removeHeaders EIP, to filter out anything like "cAmel, cAMEL" etc, or in general everything not starting with "Camel", "camel" or "org.apache.camel.".

Provider

apache

CWE / problem types

Bypass/Injection

Affected Software Versions

Apache Software Foundation:Apache Camel:[{'lessThan': '4.10.2', 'status': 'affected', 'version': '4.10.0', 'versionType': 'semver'}, {'lessThan': '4.8.5', 'status': 'affected', 'version': '4.8.0', 'versionType': 'semver'}, {'lessThan': '3.22.4', 'status': 'affected', 'version': '3.10.0', 'versionType': 'semver'}]

Date Published

2025-03-09T12:09:58.619Z

Last Updated

2025-03-17T14:42:57.795Z