CVE-2026-67211
published 2026-09-11CVE-2026-67211: OOM Denial of Service via Unbounded Map Pre-Sizing in Apache OpenNLP SymSpellModelSerializer Versions Affected: - 3.0.0-M4 - 3.0.0-M5 (The opennlp-spellcheck…
PriorityP343high7.5CVSS 3.1
AVNACLPRNUINSUCNINAH
EPSS
0.74%
54.1th percentile
OOM Denial of Service via Unbounded Map Pre-Sizing in Apache OpenNLP SymSpellModelSerializer
Versions Affected:
- 3.0.0-M4
- 3.0.0-M5
(The opennlp-spellcheck extension was introduced in 3.0.0-M4. Releases 1.x and 2.x do not contain the affected code.)
Description:
The SymSpellModelSerializer.create() method reads two 32-bit signed integer count fields (unigramCount and bigramCount) from a binary SymSpell model stream and passes each value directly to LinkedHashMap.newLinkedHashMap() after validating only that it is non-negative. No upper bound is applied, so the count is fully attacker-controlled when the model file originates from an untrusted source.
A crafted .bin model file in which either count field is set to Integer.MAX_VALUE (or any value large enough to exhaust the available heap) causes the map to be pre-sized to a capacity of 2^30 entries. The oversized backing array is allocated on the first put() into that map, requesting 4–8 GB depending on whether compressed oops are in effect, and the load fails with an OutOfMemoryError. Because the count fields sit immediately after a fixed-size header (magic, format version, three UTF strings, the configuration fields, and the edit-distance identifier) the attacker pays no meaningful size cost to weaponize a payload: a file of well under 100 bytes plus a single real entry is sufficient to crash a JVM that loads it.
Any code path that deserializes a SymSpell model is affected, including SymSpellModels.deserialize(InputStream), SymSpellModels.fromBytes(byte[]), classpath model loading via SymSpellModelResolver.resolveByLanguage(String), the CorrectTextTool command-line tool, and model-archive loading through the registered ArtifactSerializer. The opennlp-spellcheck extension ships in the official OpenNLP binary distribution.
The practical impact is denial of service against processes that load SymSpell model files from untrusted or semi-trusted origins.
Mitigation:
- 3.x users should upgrade to 3.0.0-M6.
N
Affected
3 ranges
| Vendor | Product | Version range | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| apache | opennlp | — | — |
| apache | opennlp | — | — |
| apache_software_foundation | apache_opennlp | >= 3.0.0-M4 < 3.0.0-M6 | 3.0.0-M6 |
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2026-09-11
Published