Amazon Linux 2023 : jackson-core (ALAS2023-2026-3188)

high Nessus Plugin ID 365243

Synopsis

The remote Amazon Linux 2023 host is missing a security update.

Description

It is, therefore, affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the ALAS2023-2026-3188 advisory.

NumberInput.looksLikeValidNumber() in FasterXML jackson-core pre-validates stringified numbers with two regular expressions: PATTERN_FLOAT ([+-]?[0-9]*[\.]?[0-9]+([eE][+-]?[0-9]+)?), present since 2.17.0, and PATTERN_FLOAT_TRAILING_DOT, added in 2.17.2. PATTERN_FLOAT places adjacent quantifiers over the same character class -- an optional [0-9]* run, an optional dot, then a required [0-9]+ run -- so input that ultimately fails to match forces Java's backtracking engine to retry every possible split point of the digit run.

Matching cost therefore grows with the square of the input length.

An attacker who can supply JSON that an application deserializes into a numeric target type reaches this method through jackson-databind's default String-to-number coercion (StdDeserializer and NumberDeserializers for BigDecimal, BigInteger, Double and Float).

Because StreamReadConstraints.maxStringLength defaults to 20,000,000 characters, no constraint bounds the input before it reaches the regex.

Testing by the reporter confirmed O(n^2) growth across five consecutive input-size doublings, with a single 160,000-character string consuming roughly 74 seconds in one call; a small number of concurrent requests of ordinary body size can therefore exhaust a server's request-handling thread pool.

The affected method does not exist before 2.17.0, so 2.16.x and earlier releases are not affected.

The fix replaces both regular expressions with a hand-rolled single-pass scan. (CVE-2026-89407)

UTF8DataInputJsonParser._reportInvalidToken() in FasterXML jackson-core builds the offending-token text for its error message by appending Java identifier characters to a StringBuilder in a loop that has no upper bound. Unlike the three sibling parser implementations, including UTF8StreamJsonParser, it never consults ErrorReportConfiguration.getMaxErrorTokenLength() (default 256). A malformed token supplied to a parser created through JsonFactory.createParser(DataInput) is therefore accumulated in full. No StreamReadConstraints setting mitigates this: maxDocumentLength cannot be applied to DataInput sources at all, and maxStringLength does not cover this path because the accumulation bypasses ReadConstrainedTextBuffer. The reporter measured a 20,000,109-character exception message from a 20-million-character malformed token on the DataInput path, against 367 characters for identical input on the InputStream path. Scaling the payload drives the StringBuilder, which also incurs byte-to-char expansion and internal array doubling, to many times the raw payload size and can trigger OutOfMemoryError for the whole JVM. UTF8DataInputJsonParser was introduced in 2.8.0 together with createParser(DataInput);
releases before 2.8.0 do not contain the affected class. (CVE-2026-89425)

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the tested product security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Run 'dnf update jackson-core --releasever 2023.12.20261012' or or 'dnf update --advisory ALAS2023-2026-3188 --releasever 2023.12.20261012' to update your system.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 365243

File Name: al2023_ALAS2023-2026-3188.nasl

Version: 1.1

Type: Local

Agent: unix

Family: Amazon Linux Local Security Checks

Published: 10/12/2026

Updated: 10/12/2026

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Tenable Cloud Security, Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3

Percentile: 23.63

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 5.8

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2026-89425

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 6.5

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:amazon:linux:2023, p-cpe:/a:amazon:linux:jackson-core

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/AmazonLinux/release, Host/AmazonLinux/rpm-list

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 10/12/2026

Vulnerability Publication Date: 9/22/2026

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2026-89407, CVE-2026-89425

Detections

Analytics