GitHub Advisoryadvisory · crates.io

GHSA-f9qc-qg88-7pq5 Buffa Vulnerable to Memory Exhaustion Denial of Service in decode_unknown_field via Unbounded Allocation

MEDIUM Published 2026-08-28 Modified 2026-08-28 Official page ↗
Aliases
CVE-2026-55407
Ecosystem
crates.io
Packages
buffa
Severity
Moderate
CVSS vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-770, CWE-789
Reviewed
2026-08-28

Affected packages

• crates.io buffa: < 0.8.0 → fixed in 0.8.0

Description

The `decode_unknown_field` function in buffa's protobuf decoder allocated heap memory in proportion to untrusted input (unknown fields in the serialized protobuf) without enforcing an allocation budget. Any message decoded from untrusted input using code generated with `preserve_unknown_fields=true` (the default) was affected. A small, well-formed payload of nested unknown fields inside a StartGroup could trigger roughly 22× memory amplification (e.g., a 64 MiB input forcing ~1.4 GB of heap allocation), and length-delimited unknown fields could be sized arbitrarily, enabling an unauthenticated attacker to crash a process via memory exhaustion. This was reachable from the default decode APIs, since the top-level message size cap did not account for in-decode amplification. For users of connectrpc - the DEFAULT_MAX_MESSAGE_SIZE for connectrpc is 4MiB, which limits amplification in the worst case to ~88 MiB of memory. A flood of concurrent requests with this pattern could still be used to exhaust available memory, however. Users are advised to either set `preserve_unknown_fields=false` on their current generated code, or upgrade to 0.8.0, which enforces per-message unknown field count limits - this is configurable, with a default of 1 million unknown fields, or ~40MiB of allocation overhead per message. Users are advised to update to the latest version, which enforces per-message unknown field count limits. Thank you to @p80n-sec for reporting this issue.

Related

Alias · CVE (1)

  • CVE-2026-55407 Buffa is a pure-Rust Protocol Buffers implementation with first-class protobuf editions support. vulnerability

Weakness · CWE (3)

  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption weakness
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness
  • CWE-789 Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value weakness

References