Denial of service binding form from JSON in Play Framework

Summary

Play Framework is a web framework for Java and Scala. A denial of service vulnerability has been discovered in verions 2.8.3 through 2.8.15 of Play's forms library, in both the Scala and Java APIs. This can occur when using either the `Form#bindFromRequest` method on a JSON request body or the `Form#bind` method directly on a JSON value. If the JSON data being bound to the form contains a deeply-nested JSON object or array, the form binding implementation may consume all available heap space and cause an `OutOfMemoryError`. If executing on the default dispatcher and `akka.jvm-exit-on-fatal-error` is enabled—as it is by default—then this can crash the application process. `Form.bindFromRequest` is vulnerable when using any body parser that produces a type of `AnyContent` or `JsValue` in Scala, or one that can produce a `JsonNode` in Java. This includes Play's default body parser. This vulnerability been patched in version 2.8.16. There is now a global limit on the depth of a JSON object that can be parsed, which can be configured by the user if necessary. As a workaround, applications that do not need to parse a request body of type `application/json` can switch from the default body parser to another body parser that supports only the specific type of body they expect.

Timeline

1. Jun 2, 2022, 4:45 PM UTCCVE published
2. Apr 23, 2025, 3:54 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial

3. Apr 23, 2025, 6:20 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• playframework playframework

  From 2.8.3 · fixed in 2.8.16

• com.typesafe.play:play_2.13Maven

  From 2.8.3 · fixed in 2.8.16

• com.typesafe.play:play_2.12Maven

  From 2.8.3 · fixed in 2.8.16

References 3