Play Framework is a web framework for Java and Scala. A denial of service vulnerability has been discovered in verions 2.8.3 through 2.8.15 of Play's forms library, in both the Scala and Java APIs. This can occur when using either the Form#bindFromRequest method on a JSON request body or the Form#bind method directly on a JSON value.

If the JSON data being bound to the form contains a deeply-nested JSON object or array, the form binding implementation may consume all available heap space and cause an OutOfMemoryError. If executing on the default dispatcher and akka.jvm-exit-on-fatal-error is enabled-as it is by default-then this can crash the application process. Form.bindFromRequest is vulnerable when using any body parser that produces a type of AnyContent or JsValue in Scala, or one that can produce a JsonNode in Java. This includes Play's default body parser.

This vulnerability been patched in version 2.8.16. There is now a global limit on the depth of a JSON object that can be parsed, which can be configured by the user if necessary. As a workaround, applications that do not need to parse a request body of type application/json can switch from the default body parser to another body parser that supports only the specific type of body they expect.