Executive brief
Splunk Connect for Kafka is a data integration component that connects Apache Kafka message streams to Splunk for logging and monitoring. An unauthenticated attacker with network access to the Kafka Connect REST API can craft a malicious regular expression that causes a worker thread to hang indefinitely, blocking event delivery and degrading the data pipeline's availability.
Technical details
This is a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability in the timestamp extraction feature of Splunk Connect for Kafka versions below 2.2.7. The vulnerable component evaluates user-supplied regular expressions without enforcing execution time limits, allowing an attacker to craft a pathological regex pattern that consumes excessive CPU resources when matched against event data. The attack requires network-level access to the Kafka Connect REST API and no authentication. A successful exploit causes a worker thread to become unresponsive, halting event delivery for the affected connector. The fix is available in version 2.2.7 or later.
Affected products
- Splunk Connect for Kafka below 2.2.7
Timeline
- 2026-08-19: disclosed
- 2026-08-19: advisory: SVD-2026-0808