CVE-2026-48712 — protobufjs
HIGHCVE-2026-48712 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-674 vulnerability in protobufjs. A fix is available for protobufjs — see the affected versions and patch details below.
protobufjs: Denial of service through unbounded Any expansion during JSON conversion
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-2026-48712.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-48712 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 379,145 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
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 could recurse without a depth limit while converting decoded messages to plain objects or JSON. This affected generated toObject() conversion and the custom google.protobuf.Any JSON conversion path.
A crafted protobuf binary payload containing deeply nested Any values could cause the JavaScript call stack to be exhausted during conversion to JSON.
Impact
An attacker who can provide protobuf binary data decoded by an application may be able to crash the process or otherwise cause message conversion to fail with a stack overflow.
This affects applications that decode untrusted protobuf input containing google.protobuf.Any values and then convert decoded messages to JSON or plain objects with JSON conversion enabled, for example through JSON.stringify(message), Message#toJSON(), or Type.toObject(message, { json: true }).
Applications that only decode and re-encode protobuf binary data without converting decoded messages to JSON are not directly affected by this issue.
Preconditions
- The application must decode protobuf binary data influenced by an attacker.
- The application schema must include
google.protobuf.Any, and the referencedtype_urlmust resolve to a message type in the loaded protobuf root. - The application must convert the decoded message to JSON or a plain object through an affected conversion path.
- The crafted input must contain deeply nested
Anyvalues that are expanded during conversion.
Workarounds
Avoid converting untrusted protobuf messages containing google.protobuf.Any values to JSON with affected versions. If immediate upgrade is not possible, reject or limit messages with deeply nested Any payloads at an outer protocol boundary where feasible, avoid JSON conversion of untrusted Any values, or isolate message conversion in a process that can be safely restarted.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | protobufjs | all versions | 7.6.1npm install protobufjs@7.6.1 |
| 📦npm | protobufjs | ≥ 8.0.0&&< 8.4.1 | 8.4.1npm install protobufjs@8.4.1 |
Detection & 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 7.6.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-48712 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Stop feeding it untrusted input: reject or quarantine files and payloads from unverified sources until you can upgrade, restrict accepted formats to the ones you actually need, and run the parsing or decoding step in a least-privileged sandbox or short-lived worker so a crash or corrupted read cannot reach the rest of the process.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2026-48712 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2026-48712. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
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.
Red Hat rates this issue as having Low impact for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI bootc images. Although protobufjs is present as a transitive dependency, the vulnerable parsing path is not exercised in normal product operation.
No specific mitigation required for unaffected runtime paths.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2026-48712 (CC BY 4.0)
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Developer Hub 1.9 | rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1785972843 | RHSA-2026:52768 |
| Red Hat OpenShift AI 3.4 | rhoai/odh-dashboard-rhel9:1787347991 | RHSA-2026:60520 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-48712 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2026-48712 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.