I've been reading about the unusually large Spring security patch effort and wanted to compare how others are handling Spring-related CVEs. Are you mostly upgrading dependencies as fixes become available, or taking a more structured approach? I'm especially interested in how teams are dealing with applications stuck on older Spring versions, difficult migrations between major releases, and updates that introduce compatibility problems.
3 Answers
Honestly, not very well. We’re moving from one unsupported Spring generation to another just to keep production systems moving, and some applications probably won’t receive meaningful updates at all. That’s the reality when large enterprise systems have years of coupled dependencies and limited upgrade capacity.
The clean-room validation and large dependency-build effort sounds excessive at first, but the goal is to provide reproducible, tested dependencies across supported Spring versions. That could reduce supply-chain risk, although it doesn’t eliminate the practical work of upgrading applications or dealing with breaking changes.
I’m still unclear about the release timing. If vulnerability activity is increasing, delaying a release without a clear explanation makes planning harder, especially when there is only a limited release-candidate window for the next major version.
Most CVEs are manageable when the fix is simply a dependency upgrade, but the harder ones can take months. The real problem is often compatibility: framework changes, proxy behavior, removed APIs, and transitive dependencies can turn a security patch into a much larger application change. We’ve had to test each update carefully instead of treating every upgrade as routine.
Even smaller organizations can run into this. Our migration from Spring Boot 2 to 3 has involved replacing or redesigning several pieces, including Hibernate features, messaging components, identity services, and the Redis client. We’re making progress in small steps because a full migration would be too disruptive.