RHSA-2015:2522 — Security Advisory

Updated apache-commons-collections packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

The Apache Commons Collections library provides new interfaces, implementations, and utilities to extend the features of the Java Collections Framework.

It was found that the Apache commons-collections library permitted code execution when deserializing objects involving a specially constructed chain of classes. A remote attacker could use this flaw to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the application using the commons-collections library. (CVE-2015-7501)

With this update, deserialization of certain classes in the commons-collections library is no longer allowed. Applications that require those classes to be deserialized can use the system property "org.apache.commons.collections.enableUnsafeSerialization" to re-enable their deserialization.

Further information about this security flaw may be found at: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2045023

All users of apache-commons-collections are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. All running applications using the commons-collections library must be restarted for the update to take effect.