Is it possible to mitigate CVE-2022-43782 vulnerability in Crowd without upgrading to v4.4.4?

[James Devos]

I maintain a web application that uses Atlassian Crowd 4.2.5 (server).  Because we utilize the "remote addresses" feature, I believe the application is effected by the CVE-2022-43782 vulnerability.   

According to the the documentation I've read, the only ways to mitigate this vulnerability is to either disable/remove remote addresses (which is not an option for the application I administer) or to upgrade to version 4.4.4.   However, Crowd v4.4.4 has disabled the ability for web applications to modify account email addresses using the Crowd REST API, and our application requires this functionality for users that wish to update/modify their email addresses in our application.

Is there any other way to mitigate CVE-2022-43782 besides the aforementioned options?  

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hey @James Devos 

We had issues with 4.4.4 or up as well due to the default behaviour change that doesn’t allow username changes by REST API, however we were given the below startup parameter to add and all has been fine since

-Dcrowd.email.change.by.external.apps=true

Add this, and you’ll be able to upgrade to 4.4.4 (or higher) and still change usernames using your existing process.

CCM