CVE-2025-11165: dotCMS

Critical severity, CVSS 9.9. EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

A sandbox escape vulnerability exists in dotCMS’s Velocity scripting engine (VTools) that allows authenticated users with scripting privileges to bypass class and package restrictions enforced by SecureUberspectorImpl. By dynamically modifying the Velocity engine’s runtime configuration and reinitializing its Uberspect, a malicious actor can remove the introspector.restrict.classes and introspector.restrict.packages protections. Once these restrictions are cleared, the attacker can access arbitrary Java classes, including java.lang.Runtime, and execute arbitrary system commands under the privileges of the application process (e.g. dotCMS or Tomcat user).

Affected products

• dotCMS dotCMS: before 24.12.27 (fixed in 24.12.27); from 25.01.07, before 25.07.10 (fixed in 25.07.10)

Published 2026-02-24. Last modified 2026-06-17.