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MEDIUM severity

GHSA-jggg-4jg4-v7c6 — protobufjs

MEDIUM

GHSA-jggg-4jg4-v7c6 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) CWE-674 vulnerability in protobufjs. A fix is available for protobufjs — see the affected versions and patch details below.

protobufjs: Denial of Service via unbounded recursive JSON descriptor expansion

Also known asCVE-2026-45740
Published
May 19, 2026
Updated
Sep 10, 2026
Affected
2 pkgs
Patched
2 / 2
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Sep 30, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

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 GHSA-jggg-4jg4-v7c6.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
0.5%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk+0.20%
Lower risk than most CVEs38th percentile — riskier than 38% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%0.32%0.64%0.96%0.1%0.3%0.5%Jun 26Aug 26Sep 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

GHSA-jggg-4jg4-v7c6 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.

Where this sits among everything scored

Of 380,526 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.

Real-World Exposure

2 pkgs affected

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.

6Kother npm packages depend on this — each one inherits the vulnerability until it's patched upstream
protobufjsnpm
104.3Mdownloads / week

Description

Summary

protobufjs could recurse without a depth limit while expanding nested JSON descriptors through Root.fromJSON() and Namespace.addJSON().

A crafted JSON descriptor with deeply nested namespace definitions could cause the JavaScript call stack to be exhausted during descriptor loading.

Impact

An attacker who can provide JSON descriptors loaded by an application may be able to crash the process or otherwise cause schema loading to fail with a stack overflow.

This affects applications that load JSON descriptors from untrusted sources with affected versions.

Preconditions

  • The application must load JSON descriptor data influenced by an attacker.
  • The crafted descriptor must contain deeply nested nested namespace objects.
  • The affected Root.fromJSON() / Namespace.addJSON() descriptor expansion path must process the crafted input.

Workarounds

Avoid loading untrusted protobuf JSON descriptors with affected versions. If immediate upgrade is not possible, reject excessively nested descriptor structures at an outer validation boundary where feasible, or isolate descriptor loading in a process that can be safely restarted.

Affected Packages

2 total 2 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
📦npmprotobufjsall versions7.5.8npm install protobufjs@7.5.8
📦npmprotobufjs≥ 8.0.0&&< 8.2.08.2.0npm install protobufjs@8.2.0

Affected Products

1 product · 2 configurations
Application
protobufjsprotobufjs_project
≥ 8.0.0 && < 8.2.0
range

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency
  1. Detect

    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.

  2. Fix

    Update protobufjs to 7.5.8 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-jggg-4jg4-v7c6 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

  3. 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.

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 HatImportant

This is an Important denial of service flaw in protobufjs, which could allow a remote attacker to exhaust the JavaScript call stack by providing a specially crafted JSON descriptor with deeply nested namespace definitions. This vulnerability impacts Red Hat products that utilize protobufjs for processing protobuf…

Workaround published by Red Hat
To mitigate this issue, avoid loading untrusted protobuf JSON descriptors in applications utilizing protobufjs. If untrusted descriptors must be processed, implement validation at an outer boundary to reject excessively nested structures. Alternatively, isolate the descriptor loading process in an environment that can be safely restarted in case of a denial of service.
Source: Red Hat security advisory for GHSA-jggg-4jg4-v7c6 (CC BY 4.0)
ProductFixed inAdvisory
Cryostat 4 on RHEL 9cryostat/cryostat-grafana-dashboard-rhel9:4.2.0-13RHSA-2026:48151
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10rh-podman-desktop-0:1.1.2-1.el10_2RHSA-2026:57590
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.2ansible-automation-platform/automation-portal:1784622951RHSA-2026:42815
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.2ansible-automation-platform/bootc-automation-portal-rhel9:1786006573RHSA-2026:51162
Red Hat Developer Hub 1.10rhdh/red-hat-developer-hub-backstage-plugin-lightspeed-backend:1785332487RHSA-2026:48126
Red Hat Developer Hub 1.10rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1785411652RHSA-2026:49642
Red Hat Developer Hub 1.9rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1784210921RHSA-2026:41929
Red Hat OpenShift AI 3.4rhoai/odh-dashboard-rhel9:1787347991RHSA-2026:60520

Frequently Asked Questions

## Summary protobufjs could recurse without a depth limit while expanding nested JSON descriptors through `Root.fromJSON()` and `Namespace.addJSON()`. A crafted JSON descriptor with deeply nested namespace definitions could cause the JavaScript call stack to be exhausted during descriptor loading. ## Impact An attacker who can provide JSON descriptors loaded by an application may be able to crash the process or otherwise cause schema loading to fail with a stack overflow. This affects applications that load JSON descriptors from untrusted sources with affected versions. ## Preconditions
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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GHSA-jggg-4jg4-v7c6: protobufjs | O3 Security