Spring Cloud Gateway: Critical Environment Modification Vulnerability (CVE-2025-41243)

When organizations rely on Spring Cloud Gateway to connect and protect their microservices, they trust it to enforce routing, monitoring, and security at scale. However, a newly disclosed vulnerability, CVE-2025-41243, shows just how quickly trust can be undermined when access controls aren’t airtight.

What Happened

The flaw lives in certain versions of the spring-cloud-gateway-server package. Under specific deployment conditions, attackers can abuse exposed Spring Boot actuator endpoints to modify the application’s runtime environment.

That’s as bad as it sounds—because environment modification isn’t just a tweak. It can mean attackers changing system properties, configuration parameters, or environment variables that directly shape how the application behaves.

With the right moves, that could escalate into information disclosure or even privilege escalation, creating an entry point for much larger compromises.

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Who’s Impacted

Not every Spring Cloud Gateway app is exposed—but if you’re running:

• 3.1.0 → 3.1.9
  
  
• 4.0.0 → 4.0.9
  
  
• 4.1.0 → 4.1.9
  
  
• 4.2.0 → 4.2.4
  
  
• 4.3.0 → 4.3.0
  
  

…you’re in the danger zone.

The vulnerability hinges on three conditions being met:

1. Spring Boot actuators are on the classpath.
   
   
2. The actuator web endpoint is enabled and exposed.
   
   
3. Those endpoints are unsecured and attacker-accessible.
   
   

If that describes your setup, you should assume exposure.

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Why It Matters

Spring Cloud Gateway is popular precisely because it reduces complexity—routing requests, adding resiliency, and enforcing policies. But in this case, the same extensibility that makes it powerful also makes it risky when controls aren’t carefully locked down.

In regulated environments, this kind of misconfiguration risk can be a direct hit to compliance (SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, etc.) and a tempting target for attackers scanning for misconfigured APIs.

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Mitigation Options

The official Spring team is only patching community-supported versions, which leaves anyone on older releases in limbo. If you’re in that group, you’ve got three main paths:

• Upgrade to a fixed, supported release of Spring Cloud Gateway.
  
  
• Disable exposure by removing gateway from management.endpoints.web.exposure.include.
  
  
• Lock down actuator endpoints so they’re not open to the world.
  
  

And for teams who can’t upgrade immediately? That’s where commercial post-EOL support comes in. HeroDevs provides Never-Ending Support (NES) for Spring Cloud Gateway, delivering critical fixes like this one even after community support ends.

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Final Thoughts

CVE-2025-41243 is a reminder that “just a misconfiguration” can easily become a critical exploit surface when you’re working with cloud-native infrastructure.

If you want the full breakdown—including technical details, affected package links, and references—check out our CVE directory entry for CVE-2025-41243 (insert your internal link).

In the meantime, lock down those actuators, upgrade where possible, and don’t let end-of-life dependencies put your environment at risk.

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