What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-44288: protobufjs: Overlong UTF-8 decoding
- Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-05-13 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-176
Description
protobufjs compiles protobuf definitions into JavaScript (JS) functions. Prior to 7.5.6 and 8.0.2, protobufjs includes a minimal UTF-8 decoder that accepted overlong UTF-8 byte sequences and decoded them to their canonical characters instead of replacing them. An attacker who can provide protobuf binary data decoded through the affected UTF-8 path may be able to bypass application-level checks that inspect raw bytes before protobuf string decoding. For example, bytes that do not contain certain ASCII characters could decode to strings containing those characters. This vulnerability is fixed in 7.5.6 and 8.0.2.
Affected products
- protobufjs: before 7.5.6; from 8.0.0 before 8.0.2 — fixed in 7.5.6, 8.0.2
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: protobufjs 7.5.6, 8.0.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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