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CVE-2026-104016EUVD-2026-111529GHSA-C2RQ-MCFV-JW29

jackson-dataformat-protobuf: signed integer overflow in string-length paths allows unbounded array allocation and OutOfMemoryError

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 2.18.12, 2.21.8, 2.22.4, 3.1.8, 3.2.4
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub

Summary

The jackson-dataformat-protobuf library, which Java applications use to parse Protobuf data through Jackson, is affected. A specially crafted small protobuf payload can trigger an integer overflow that causes the parser to attempt a huge memory allocation, crashing the application with an OutOfMemoryError and causing a denial of service.

Summarized by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5. Verify details against the original sources.

Read the original description

ProtobufParser parses length-prefixed protobuf string and bytes fields by checking (_inputPtr + len) <= _inputEnd and then, on the fast path, calling _finishShortText(len). Both use 32-bit signed integer arithmetic. When an attacker supplies a varint decoding to a length near Integer.MAX_VALUE, _inputPtr + len overflows to a negative value, the bounds check passes, and _finishShortText(len) reaches TextBuffer.expandCurrentSegment(len), which performs Arrays.copyOf with no cap and throws OutOfMemoryError: Requested array size exceeds VM limit. The JVM refuses arrays larger than Integer.MAX_VALUE - 8 before consulting available heap, so -Xmx tuning does not mitigate the issue. StreamReadConstraints.maxStringLength and maxDocumentLength do not gate this path: a 33-byte payload is far below any document-length cap and the string-length check does not fire before the allocation. This was confirmed empirically against shipping artifacts with maxStringLength, maxDocumentLength and maxNestingDepth all configured. A February 2026 hardening commit added the equivalent overflow guard to the packed-array-length and message-length paths but left the string-length call sites unguarded. No privileges or user interaction beyond the ability to submit data for parsing are required.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. First seen by cve.now

Affected versions

  • com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat:jackson-dataformat-protobuf

    From 2.6.0 · fixed in 2.18.12; From 2.19.0 · fixed in 2.21.8; From 2.22.0 · fixed in 2.22.4

  • tools.jackson.dataformat:jackson-dataformat-protobuf

    From 3.0.0 · fixed in 3.1.8; From 3.2.0 · fixed in 3.2.4

References 1

GitHub · FasterXML/jackson-dataformats-binary