What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-44289: protobufjs: Denial of service through unbounded protobuf recursion

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-05-13 · updated 2026-08-28
• Weakness: CWE-674

Description

protobufjs compiles protobuf definitions into JavaScript (JS) functions. Prior to 7.5.6 and 8.0.2, protobufjs could recurse without a depth limit while decoding nested protobuf data. This affected both skipping unknown group fields and generated decoding of nested message fields. A crafted protobuf binary payload could cause the JavaScript call stack to be exhausted during decoding. 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

• https://github.com/protobufjs/protobuf.js/security/advisories/GHSA-685m-2w69-288q
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:42815
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:60520
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-44289
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2477130
• https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-44289.json

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