From the Spring blog:
Spring Boot users are only affected by this vulnerability if they have switched the default logging system to Log4J2. The
log4j-to-slf4jandlog4j-apijars that we include inspring-boot-starter-loggingcannot be exploited on their own. Only applications usinglog4j-coreand including user input in log messages are vulnerable.
Useful explanation points:
log4j-to-slf4j is an adapter between the Log4j API and SLF4J. It indeed brings log4j-api, but it does not bring log4j-core, so our starter is not affected by this vulnerability.