Executive brief
Spring AI is a framework for building AI applications within Spring applications. A flaw in its PDF processing component allows attackers to crash the ingestion service by uploading a specially crafted PDF with a deeply nested or circular table of contents, causing a denial of service that disrupts PDF document processing workflows.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a StackOverflowError triggered during PDF ingestion when the PDF parser encounters a deeply nested or cyclic table of contents structure. The root cause lies in the recursive parsing logic that lacks adequate depth limits or cycle detection when traversing the table of contents tree. An attacker can craft a malicious PDF and upload it to a service using Spring AI; the parser will recurse indefinitely until the stack is exhausted, crashing the ingestion thread. This is a denial-of-service attack that does not require authentication and can be exploited by any user capable of uploading or providing a PDF for processing.
Affected products
- Spring Spring AI 1.0.0 - 1.0.9, 1.1.0 - 1.1.8, 2.0.0
Timeline
- 2026-08-27: disclosed