CVE-2026-90436

Attack Surface

Description

** UNSUPPORTED WHEN ASSIGNED ** Deserialization of an inbound SOAP fault in Apache Axis 1.x allows unauthenticated remote class instantiation. When a SOAP <Fault> carries a <detail><exceptionName> element, Axis loads the named class and, if a String <data> element is also present, instantiates it through its String constructor before checking that it is an AxisFault. Loading alone runs the class's static initializer. With a suitable class on the application's classpath this leads to remote code execution. The fault is parsed while the engine resolves the target service, before any per-service handler chain runs, so authentication handlers configured on a service do not protect against it. This affects all Apache Axis 1.x versions through 1.4. As Axis 1 has been EOL we recommend you migrate to a different SOAP engine, such as Apache Axis 2/Java. Alternatively you could use a build of Axis with the patch from https://github.com/apache/axis-axis1-java/commit/41f3b4e8d04e310ca81f86b92630ab2c11d608bd applied. The Apache Axis project does not expect to create an Axis 1.x release fixing this problem.

Weakness Classification (1)

Affected Software (9)

References & Advisories (3)

Proof of Concept (1)