CVE-2026-91863: Apache Neethi: Uncontrolled recursion while parsing crafted WS-Policy documents allows denial of service

[Colm O hEigeartaigh <coheigea () apache org>]

Severity: moderate 

Affected versions:

- Apache Neethi (org.apache.neethi:neethi) before 3.2.4

Description:

A specially crafted WS-Policy document with deeply nested policy elements can bypass Neethi's nesting-depth limit and 
exhaust the thread stack, crashing the parser (denial of service).
Users are recommended to upgrade to version 3.2.4, which fixes this issue.

Credit:

This issue was found using Claude agents to study the security of open-source projects (finder)

References:

https://ws.apache.org/
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-91863