Description

ColdFusion is affected by an Improper Input Validation vulnerability that could result in an application denial-of-service. An attacker with high privileges could exploit this vulnerability to crash the application, leading to a denial-of-service condition. Exploitation of this issue does not require user interaction.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "4.9",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-11T17:18:00.023Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-11T17:18:00.023Z",
  "executiveSummary": "An improper input validation vulnerability has been identified in ColdFusion, posing a direct threat to application availability. This security flaw enables a suitably privileged adversary to trigger an application crash, culminating in a complete denial-of-service condition.\nThe vulnerability resides within the input processing mechanisms of the affected product, where insufficient validation of supplied data allows malicious or malformed input to destabilize the runtime environment.\nExploitation of this security issue carries severe risk implications, as an unexpected application crash disrupts business-critical operations and services dependent on the ColdFusion runtime.\nA successful attack requires high privileges within the target system, meaning the adversary must already possess elevated authentication credentials or administrative access to execute the payload.\nCritically, the exploitation vector does not necessitate any user interaction, allowing the authenticated attacker to independently initiate and finalize the denial-of-service attack sequence without social engineering or human intervention.\nOrganizations operating vulnerable deployments must prioritize restricting administrative access and applying official vendor patches or configuration hardening as soon as they become available to mitigate the risk of service disruption.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability stems from improper input validation within the input handling logic of ColdFusion. When the application receives specially crafted input parameters that fail to undergo rigorous sanitization, structural verification, or boundary checks, the internal parsing and processing routines encounter unhandled exceptions or memory faults.\nThe vulnerable component is responsible for ingesting and interpreting administrative or high-privilege control inputs. Because the application trusts the incoming data streams without enforcing strict type and length constraints, the malicious input propagates deeply into the core execution pipeline.\nRegarding attack requirements and prerequisites, exploitation mandates high privileges within the application environment. An unauthenticated external entity cannot directly trigger this vulnerability unless they have previously compromised an administrative account or leveraged a separate authentication bypass mechanism.\nThe attack flow proceeds in a deterministic sequence. First, the authenticated attacker crafts a specific payload designed to exploit the input validation flaw. Second, the attacker transmits this payload to the vulnerable endpoint or administrative interface of the ColdFusion application using the appropriate network protocol. Third, the application's processing engine ingests the payload without enforcing proper validation constraints. Fourth, as the engine attempts to process the malformed data structure, it triggers a fatal runtime error or exception that cannot be gracefully handled. Finally, the unhandled condition forces the ColdFusion process to terminate abruptly, resulting in a denial-of-service state for all hosted applications and services.\nThe payload behavior is focused entirely on destabilizing the host process rather than achieving remote code execution or data exfiltration. By overwhelming or invalidating internal state logic, the payload induces an immediate crash.\nThe post-exploitation impact is constrained to availability loss. While the vulnerability does not directly facilitate horizontal privilege escalation, data theft, or arbitrary code execution, the resulting denial-of-service condition effectively halts all dependent web applications and services until manual or automated service recovery is performed."
}