CVE-2026-41727: VMware Spring For Apache Kafka

Medium severity, CVSS 6.5. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Spring Kafka's retry topic infrastructure did not sufficiently validate user-controlled header values before acting on them. A producer could send a record with a crafted retry_topic-attempts header to supply an out-of-range attempt count and cause the retry topic router to misidentify where the message was in the retry sequence. Affected versions: Spring for Apache Kafka 4.0.0 through 4.0.5; 3.3.0 through 3.3.15; 3.2.0 through 3.2.13; 2.9.0 through 2.9.13; 2.8.0 through 2.8.11.

Affected products

• VMware Spring For Apache Kafka: from 2.8.0, before 2.8.12 (fixed in 2.8.12); from 2.9.0, before 2.9.14 (fixed in 2.9.14); from 3.2.0, before 3.2.14 (fixed in 3.2.14); from 3.3.0, before 3.3.15.1 (fixed in 3.3.15.1); from 4.0.0, before 4.0.5.1 (fixed in 4.0.5.1)

Published 2026-06-10. Last modified 2026-07-23.