jackson-databind VS presentation-cve-is-dead

Jackson had this problem a few months back, where someone reported a critical CVE against the project and broke builds all around the planet https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-databind/issues/3972

Basically the programmer (not the attacker) had to write code where an object contained itself

HashMap map=new HashMap<>();

map.put("recursive",map);

After this, Jackson would indeed stack overflow if you asked it to wrap the object to JSON. Then again, half the build-in Java functions (e.g. getting an object hashcode for the map object) also fail for a recursive structure.

The issue remains open 3 months later, Mitre still thinks it's hella serious, and people have yet again learned to just ignore their CI warning about CVEs

jackson-databind maintainer responds to a similar occurrence few weeks ago: https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-databind/issues/3972#is...

As to Jackson itself see https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-databind/issues/1970 for example on startup issues. There are others.

after reading https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-databind/issues/2239 but setting JsonCreator and adding the JsonFormat didn't work.

Jackson should support records out of the box https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-databind/issues/2709

Its not like this vulnerability is something new. Similar issues have been public knowledge for at least four years and discussed widely. The fact that str to int and int to str conversions are slow for huge ints is hardly news.

In C#, Newtonsoft Json has similar functionality, and in Java — Jackson2 ObjectMapper.

Greg Kroah-Hartman (the kernel developer/maintainer) in 2019 gave a presentation about some of the issues with CVEs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeeoTE9jLjM

https://github.com/gregkh/presentation-cve-is-dead

That said, using this to track how many bugs are introduced each year is problematic. It's often the case that commit A introduces a bug, commit B aims to fix it and says "Fixes: A" but turns out to only be a partial fix, and then commit C completes the fix and says "Fixes: B". Naively, based on the se annotations it would make sense to say "B introduced a bug", but that isn't always the case.

Greg KH discusses this in his talk "CVEs are dead" (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeeoTE9jLjM slides: https://github.com/gregkh/presentation-cve-is-dead/blob/mast... ).