Executive Summary

CVE-2026-41727 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Spring for Apache Kafka versions 2.8.0 through 4.0.5. It arises because the retry topic infrastructure does not sufficiently validate user-controlled header values.

An attacker can exploit this by sending a record with a specially crafted retry_topic-attempts header containing an out-of-range attempt count. This causes the retry topic router to misidentify the message's position in the retry sequence.

Additionally, the retry_topic_backoff-timestamp header can be manipulated without bounds checking, allowing an attacker to set an arbitrarily long pause, effectively stalling the listener beyond the intended retry window.

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Impact Analysis

This vulnerability can impact you by allowing an attacker to disrupt the normal retry processing of messages in Spring for Apache Kafka.

Specifically, by manipulating the retry_topic-attempts header, the attacker can cause the system to misroute messages in the retry sequence.

By manipulating the retry_topic_backoff-timestamp header, the attacker can stall the listener for an arbitrarily long time, potentially causing denial of service or delays in message processing.

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Mitigation Strategies

The primary mitigation step is to upgrade Spring for Apache Kafka to the fixed versions that address this vulnerability.

No additional mitigation steps are necessary beyond upgrading.

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Compliance Impact

The provided information does not specify any direct impact of CVE-2026-41727 on compliance with common standards and regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA.

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