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CRITICAL

SQL injection in JDBC Appender in Apache Log4j V1

Published Jan 18, 2022

Description

By design, the JDBCAppender in Log4j 1.2.x accepts an SQL statement as a configuration parameter where the values to be inserted are converters from PatternLayout. The message converter, %m, is likely to always be included. This allows attackers to manipulate the SQL by entering crafted strings into input fields or headers of an application that are logged allowing unintended SQL queries to be executed. Note this issue only affects Log4j 1.x when specifically configured to use the JDBCAppender, which is not the default. Beginning in version 2.0-beta8, the JDBCAppender was re-introduced with proper support for parameterized SQL queries and further customization over the columns written to in logs. Apache Log4j 1.2 reached end of life in August 2015. Users should upgrade to Log4j 2 as it addresses numerous other issues from the previous versions.

Affected products

Remediation

Vendor solution

Users should upgrade to Log4j 2 or remove usage of the JDBCAppender from their configurations.

Red Hat statement

Note this issue only affects Log4j 1.x when specifically configured to use the JDBCAppender, which is not the default. Red Hat Satellite bundles log4j-over-slf4j with Candlepin, however, product is not affected as it uses logback framework for logging. Red Hat Virtualization and OpenShift Container Platform in the OCP Metering stack (the Hive/Presto/Hadoop components) ship a vulnerable version of the log4j package, however JDBCAppender is not used. Therefore the impact of this vulnerability for these products is rated Low.

Red Hat mitigation

These are the possible mitigations for this flaw for releases version 1.x: - Comment out or remove JDBCAppender in the Log4j configuration if it is used - Remove the JDBCAppender class from the server's jar files. For example: ``` zip -q -d log4j-*.jar org/apache/log4j/jdbc/JDBCAppender.class ```

Metrics

Weaknesses (1)

References (12)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner apache
Published Jan 18, 2022
Updated May 27, 2026
Reserved Jan 17, 2022
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated May 22, 2026
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Important
Public date Jan 18, 2022
GHSA-65FG-84F6-3JQ3