Critical React & Next.js Deserialization Bug Leads to RCE: What You Need to Know
In April 2025, security researchers disclosed critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-55182 and CVE-2025-66478) affecting the React and Next.js frameworks, specifically tied to unsafe data serialization and deserialization mechanisms in the Server Actions and Flight protocol. Attackers exploited the flaw to achieve remote code execution (RCE), enabling credential harvesting, lateral movement, and persistent access across affected environments. Within days of the CVEs’ disclosures, weaponized public exploit scripts proliferated on GitHub, compressing defenders’ reaction times and raising the risk of widespread attacks on applications running modern web stacks. This incident highlights the persistent danger of insecure serialization across software ecosystems, a threat pattern seen across at least a decade and multiple development languages. As AI-augmented coding accelerates release cycles, the lessons of past serialization flaws remain vital to protect emerging cloud-native applications from rapidly evolving threats.
Kill Chain
