GitHub Advisoryadvisory · Go
GHSA-whmm-qj9r-wvr2 td has pre-auth denial of service via unbounded memory allocation in proto.UnencryptedMessage.Decode
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-54638
- Ecosystem
- Go
- Packages
- github.com/gotd/td
- Severity
- High
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-770, CWE-789
- Reviewed
- 2026-07-28
Affected packages
• Go github.com/gotd/td: < 0.145.1 → fixed in 0.145.1
Description
Impact
A remote, unauthenticated attacker can cause excessive memory allocation (and resulting CPU / GC pressure, potentially OOM termination) by sending a crafted unencrypted MTProto packet.
`(*proto.UnencryptedMessage).Decode` read an attacker-controlled 32-bit `dataLen` field and immediately allocated a buffer of that size via `make([]byte, dataLen)` before validating that the underlying buffer actually contained that many bytes. A 20-byte packet declaring a ~1.75 GB payload (e.g. `dataLen = 0x70000000`) forces the runtime to provision and zero-initialize a multi-gigabyte heap allocation before the length is rejected.
Unencrypted messages are part of the unauthenticated MTProto handshake path, so no credentials or established session are required to reach the vulnerable code.
Impact is limited to availability; there is no evidence of memory corruption, out-of-bounds access, or code execution.
Patches
Fixed in v0.145.1 by validating `dataLen` against the remaining buffer length before allocation (commit `9d5d1f31e`).
Workarounds
Upgrade to v0.145.1 or later. There is no in-process workaround for affected versions short of avoiding exposure of the unauthenticated MTProto parsing path to untrusted peers.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-54638 gotd/td is a T Telegram MTProto API client in Go. vulnerability