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Fencer Vulns
critical 9.8

CVE-2023-36665 json

protobufjs Prototype Pollution vulnerability

published 2023-07-05 3 y ago modified 2026-08-07 3 mo ago also GHSA-h755-8qp9-cq85 , EUVD-2023-2072

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.7%
EPSS 1.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 77%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

"protobuf.js (aka protobufjs) 6.10.0 through 7.x before 7.2.5 allows Prototype Pollution, a different vulnerability than CVE-2022-25878. A user-controlled protobuf message can be used by an attacker to pollute the prototype of Object.prototype by adding and overwriting its data and functions. Exploitation can involve: (1) using the function parse to parse protobuf messages on the fly, (2) loading .proto files by using load/loadSync functions, or (3) providing untrusted input to the functions ReflectionObject.setParsedOption and util.setProperty.

Patch / fix

  • npm protobufjs 6.11.4, 7.2.5
  • protobufjs_project protobufjs 7.2.5

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2023-36665 updated cvss 8.6

protobufjs: prototype pollution using user-controlled protobuf message

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 grafana, grafana-loki, grafana-mssql, grafana-mysql, grafana-selinux, grafana-graphite, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 grafana, grafana-selinux Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift4/ose-console
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Ceph Storage 6 ceph, cephadm, grafana, librbd1, librgw2, rbd-nbd, +17 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

1.70% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 77% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • code-intelligence.com https://www.code-intelligence.com/blog/cve-protobufjs-prototype-pollution-cve-2023-36665 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
GitHub 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm protobufjs
>=7.0.0, <7.2.5
>=6.10.0, <6.11.4
7.2.5
6.11.4

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-1321 Improperly Controlled Modification of Object Prototype Attributes

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.