GHSA-3j69-69wj-xqx2 UltraJSON: Malformed/Truncated UTF-8 Accepted and Silently Rewritten in ujson.dumps()

• PyPI ujson: < 5.13.0 → fixed in 5.13.0

Summary `ujson.dumps()` (or `ujson.dump()` or `ujson.encode()`) have a `reject_bytes=False` option. When set, they may accept malformed or truncated UTF-8 byte sequences, silently rewriting them into different Unicode characters instead of rejecting them. This leads to input validation bypass and data integrity issues. Details The expected behavior is that for `x` being any bytes string, `x == ujson.loads(ujson.dumps(x, reject_bytes=False)).encode(errors="surrogatepass")` should always either be true or `ujson.dumps()` will throw an exception. In reality, some strings which should've been errors are silently rewritten as other strings: • Invalid continuation bytes are replaced with valid ones: `b'\xcf\x13'` -> `b'\xcf\x93'` • Unterminated sequence completes the sequence: `b'\xc3'` -> `b'\xc3\x80'` • ... or leads to reading past the end of string: `b'\xf0\x90\x94'` -> `b"\xf0\x90\x94\x80inxcontrib'"` Impact An application relying on reject_bytes=False for UTF-8 handling may experience: • Data integrity issues • Experience validation bypass if said validation occurs before serialisation Remediation The missing/broken UTF-8 validation checks were added/fixed in https://github.com/ultrajson/ultrajson/commit/169eaf36b1116fece5034ee79a7a0ef3f6deedcf. We recommend upgrading to UltraJSON 5.13.0. Workarounds Decoding bytes to strings in Python before passing them to `ujson.dumps()` avoids this issue.