The Apache Software Foundation

Security release: Apache James server 3.0.1

October 20, 2017


The Apache James PMCs are glad to announce you the release version 3.0.1 of Apache James server.

It fixes vulnerability described in CVE-2017-12628. The JMX server, also used by the command line client is exposed to a java de-serialization issue, and thus can be used to execute arbitrary commands. As James exposes JMX socket by default only on local-host, this vulnerability can only be used for privilege escalation.

Release 3.0.1 upgrades the incriminated library.

Note that you can take additional defensive steps in order to mitigate this vulnerability:

  • Ensure that you restrict the access to JMX only on local-host
  • Ensure that you are using a recent Java Run-time Environment. For instance OpenJDK 8 u111 is vulnerable but OpenJDK 8 u 141 is not.
  • You can additionally run James in a container to limit damages of potential exploits
  • And of course upgrade to the newest 3.0.1 version.

Read more about Java deserialization issues.