CVE-2021-45046

Incomplete fix for Apache Log4j vulnerability

Published

2021-12-14

Modified

2026-11-04

EPSS percentile

100%

Aliases

GHSA-7rjr-3q55-vv33

Sources

cisa-kev, github-advisory

Summary

# Impact The fix to address [CVE-2021-44228](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-44228) in Apache Log4j 2.15.0 was incomplete in certain non-default configurations. This could allow attackers with control over Thread Context Map (MDC) input data when the logging configuration uses a non-default Pattern Layout with either a Context Lookup (for example, $${ctx:loginId}) or a Thread Context Map pattern (%X, %mdc, or %MDC) to craft malicious input data using a JNDI Lookup pattern resulting in a remote code execution (RCE) attack. ## Affected packages Only the `org.apache.logging.log4j:log4j-core` package is directly affected by this vulnerability. The `org.apache.logging.log4j:log4j-api` should be kept at the same version as the `org.apache.logging.log4j:log4j-core` package to ensure compatability if in use. # Mitigation Log4j 2.16.0 fixes this issue by removing support for message lookup patterns and disabling JNDI functionality by default. This issue can be mitigated in prior releases (< 2.16.0) by removing the JndiLookup class from the classpath (example: zip -q -d log4j-core-*.jar org/apache/logging/log4j/core/lookup/JndiLookup.class). Log4j 2.15.0 restricts JNDI LDAP lookups to localhost by default. Note that previous mitigations involving configuration such as to set the system property `log4j2.formatMsgNoLookups` to `true` do NOT mitigate this specific vulnerability.

Affected packages

Remediation: Upgrade to 2.16.0 or later.

References

• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-7rjr-3q55-vv33