Apache Log4j 2 VS aegis4j

I don't think that's a good example. While Apache devs are volunteers and Microsoft devs are employees, they were criticized for their slow response time and seeming lack of urgency until it was far too late.

https://github.com/apache/logging-log4j2/pull/608#issuecomme...

The official website. The vulnerability was introduced in 2.0-beta7 which was released in 2013.

However, there are many open source projects that are widely used but not well-known, including cURL, ImageMagick, MyCLI, Homebrew, Apache Log4j, and OpenSSL. This article will take a closer look at these unsung heroes of the open source world. I do not want to give them a business model or financial advice in this article. This largely depends on the author's personal experience and values. I just want to raise more awareness about these open source projects.

What you need is log4j-core, what you downloaded is some kind of connector between log4j and JUL. Tbh I don't know what JUL is, but that's not important. You can get log4j-core on from the official website - https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/ or in maven repo. In case you're not using maven, I highly, highly recommend you using it for managing your dependencies.

> When it was first revealed in early December 2021, the Log4Shell bug was described as one of the most severe security vulnerabilities ever.

> The Apache Software Foundation, which maintains the open-source tool, quickly released a patch...

Apache horribly mismanaged this and did not release a patch until it was already widely known and being exploited in the wild. They also messed up and had to release several subsequent patches to actually fix the vulnerability.

Remember: this vulnerability was disclosed to them in November.

https://github.com/apache/logging-log4j2/pull/608#issuecomme...

Think back to the Log4J event, were you affected? (https://github.com/apache/logging-log4j2)

The guys at Oracle have made this point on this forum quite often, but it never really hit home for me personally until the recent log4j vulnerability made me more interested in the topic and the available mitigation options (see https://github.com/gredler/aegis4j/).

If you've been impacted by these log4j vulnerabilities, have a look at aegis4j, a Java agent that completely disables platform features you don't use, before an attacker uses them against you (including e.g. JNDI and Java serialization).

https://github.com/gredler/aegis4j/

Yep, this is why strategically patching InitialContext when the class is initially loaded will completely disable JNDI (and mitigate future JNDI-based exploits).

The recent log4j vulnerability really piqued my interest, and I've spent the last few evenings working on a proof of concept Java agent that could mitigate similar vulnerabilities in the future, for applications that are able to completely forego platform features like JNDI, serialization or native process execution.

Link to the project: https://github.com/gredler/aegis4j

It's not a lot of code, but it uses parts of the platform that I think are a bit unusual for most devs, so it was quite interesting to implement. Happy to discuss details, ideas, and concerns.

One idea for a possible improvement is to make the feature block list adaptive, i.e. watch what the application uses in the first few minutes of execution, and then shut down all unused "dangerous" features for the remaining lifetime of the VM. Not sure how reliable this would be though, especially for services which have background jobs that might only run once a day.