CVE-2025-2240 is a high-severity vulnerability identified in the Smallrye Fault Tolerance component used within Red Hat Build of Apache Camel 4.8 for Quarkus 3.15, specifically affecting versions 6.3.0 and 6.5.0. The flaw arises from improperly controlled sequential memory allocation when the metrics URI is accessed. Each invocation of this URI triggers the creation of a new object within the meterMap data structure without adequate cleanup or limits, leading to unbounded memory consumption. Over time, repeated calls can exhaust available memory resources, causing an out-of-memory (OOM) condition that results in a denial of service (DoS) by crashing or severely degrading the affected service. The vulnerability requires no authentication or user interaction and can be exploited remotely over the network, as indicated by the CVSS vector (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N). Although it does not impact confidentiality or integrity, the availability impact is critical. No known exploits are currently reported in the wild, but the ease of exploitation and the potential for service disruption make this a significant threat for systems utilizing the affected Smallrye Fault Tolerance versions within Apache Camel for Quarkus environments. This vulnerability highlights a resource management weakness in the metrics collection mechanism, which is often exposed to external monitoring or management tools, increasing the attack surface.

For European organizations, the impact of CVE-2025-2240 can be substantial, particularly for enterprises relying on Red Hat's Apache Camel integration framework within Quarkus-based microservices architectures. The vulnerability can be weaponized to cause service outages by exhausting memory resources, leading to denial of service conditions. This can disrupt critical business processes, especially in sectors such as finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and public services where high availability and reliability are paramount. Additionally, organizations that expose metrics endpoints for monitoring and observability could inadvertently increase their attack surface. The disruption of services could lead to operational downtime, financial losses, and reputational damage. Moreover, in regulated industries subject to strict uptime and incident reporting requirements, such outages could have compliance implications. The lack of confidentiality or integrity impact reduces the risk of data breaches but does not diminish the operational risk posed by service unavailability.

To mitigate CVE-2025-2240, European organizations should prioritize the following actions: 1) Apply patches or updates from Red Hat or the Apache Camel project as soon as they become available to address the underlying memory allocation flaw. 2) If immediate patching is not feasible, implement network-level access controls to restrict access to the metrics URI only to trusted monitoring systems and internal networks, minimizing exposure to external attackers. 3) Employ rate limiting or throttling on the metrics endpoint to prevent excessive or automated requests that could trigger memory exhaustion. 4) Monitor application memory usage and set up alerts for abnormal increases that may indicate exploitation attempts. 5) Review and harden the configuration of Smallrye Fault Tolerance and related components to ensure resource usage is optimized and unnecessary endpoints are disabled or protected. 6) Conduct regular security assessments and penetration testing focused on API and metrics endpoints to identify similar resource exhaustion vulnerabilities. 7) Consider deploying Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) or API gateways with anomaly detection capabilities to detect and block suspicious traffic patterns targeting the metrics URI.