CVE-2026-44290 — protobufjs
HIGHCVE-2026-44290 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-1321 vulnerability in protobufjs. A fix is available for protobufjs — see the affected versions and patch details below.
protobufjs: Process-wide denial of service through unsafe option paths
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-44290.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
protobufjsnpmDescription
Summary
protobufjs allowed certain schema option paths to traverse through inherited object properties while applying options. A crafted protobuf schema or JSON descriptor could cause option handling to write to properties on global JavaScript constructors, corrupting process-wide built-in functionality.
Impact
An attacker who can provide or influence protobuf schemas or JSON descriptors may be able to corrupt built-in process state in a way that causes subsequent application code or protobufjs code to fail. This can result in a persistent denial of service for the lifetime of the affected process.
This issue affects applications that parse or load protobuf schemas or descriptors from untrusted sources. Applications that use bundled, generated, or otherwise trusted schemas to decode untrusted protobuf message payloads are not directly affected.
The issue is not known to allow code execution by itself.
Preconditions
- The application must allow an attacker to control or influence a protobuf schema or JSON descriptor.
- The application must parse or load that schema through protobufjs reflection APIs such as
parse,Root.load,Root.loadSync, orRoot.fromJSON. - The crafted input must contain option paths that reach unsafe inherited properties during option processing.
Workarounds
Do not parse or load protobuf schemas or JSON descriptors from untrusted sources with affected versions. If untrusted schemas must be accepted, validate or reject option names containing unsafe property path components before loading them, and run schema processing in an isolated process.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | protobufjs | all versions | 7.5.6npm install protobufjs@7.5.6 |
| 📦npm | protobufjs | ≥ 8.0.0&&< 8.0.2 | 8.0.2npm install protobufjs@8.0.2 |
Affected Products
protobufjsprotobufjs_projectDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for protobufjs, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update protobufjs to 7.5.6 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-44290 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
This is an Important denial of service vulnerability in protobufjs. A remote attacker could provide a specially crafted protobuf schema or JSON descriptor, which, when processed by an application using protobufjs, could corrupt process-wide built-in functionality, leading to a persistent denial of service. This impact…
To mitigate this issue, Red Hat recommends configuring applications to avoid parsing or loading protobuf schemas or JSON descriptors from untrusted sources. If processing untrusted schemas is unavoidable, implement strict validation to reject option names containing unsafe property path components before loading them. Additionally, consider running schema processing in an isolated environment to limit the blast radius of potential corruption.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2026-44290 (CC BY 4.0)
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Cryostat 4 on RHEL 9 | cryostat/cryostat-grafana-dashboard-rhel9:4.2.0-13 | RHSA-2026:48151 |
| Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.2 | ansible-automation-platform/automation-portal:1784622951 | RHSA-2026:42815 |
| Red Hat OpenShift AI 3.4 | rhoai/odh-dashboard-rhel9:1787347991 | RHSA-2026:60520 |
| Red Hat OpenShift AI 3.4 | rhoai/odh-mod-arch-eval-hub-rhel9:1791861214 | RHSA-2026:84734 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-44290 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.