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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.3

CVE-2026-44288 json

protobufjs: Overlong UTF-8 decoding

published 2026-05-12 5 mo ago modified 2026-09-10 1 mo ago also GHSA-q6x5-8v7m-xcrf , EUVD-2026-30026

cvss
5.3
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 22%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

protobufjs compiles protobuf definitions into JavaScript (JS) functions. Prior to 7.5.6 and 8.0.2, protobufjs includes a minimal UTF-8 decoder that accepted overlong UTF-8 byte sequences and decoded them to their canonical characters instead of replacing them. An attacker who can provide protobuf binary data decoded through the affected UTF-8 path may be able to bypass application-level checks that inspect raw bytes before protobuf string decoding. For example, bytes that do not contain certain ASCII characters could decode to strings containing those characters. This vulnerability is fixed in 7.5.6 and 8.0.2.

Patch / fix

  • npm protobufjs 7.5.6, 8.0.2
  • npm @protobufjs/utf8 1.1.1
  • protobufjs_project protobufjs 7.5.6, 8.0.2

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-2026-44288 updated cvss 5.3

protobufjs: protobufjs: Security control bypass due to improper handling of overlong UTF-8 sequences

  • Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines openshift-pipelines/pipelines-console-plugin-rhel8, openshift-pipelines/pipelines-console-plugin-rhel9 Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 3 openshift-service-mesh/kiali-rhel9, openshift-service-mesh/kiali-ossmc-rhel9 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 automation-platform-ui, ansible-automation-platform-26/gateway-rhel9 Red Hat Build of Podman Desktop rh-podman-desktop.git Red Hat Ceph Storage 9 rhceph/alloy-rhel10 Red Hat Developer Hub 1 rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9
    +1 more products
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 grafana, grafana-loki, grafana-mssql, grafana-mysql, grafana-selinux, grafana-graphite, +8 more
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 grafana, grafana-selinux
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) 3 rhelai3/bootc-cuda-rhel9, rhelai3/bootc-rocm-rhel9, rhelai3/bootc-gaudi-rhel9, rhelai3/disk-image-cuda-rhel9 Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) rhoai/odh-dashboard-rhel9, rhoai/odh-mod-arch-maas-rhel9, rhoai/odh-mod-arch-automl-rhel9, rhoai/odh-mod-arch-gen-ai-rhel9, rhoai/odh-mod-arch-mlflow-rhel9, rhoai/odh-mod-arch-autorag-rhel9, +2 more Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift3/ose-console, openshift4/ose-console, openshift4/ose-console-rhel9 Red Hat Openshift Data Foundation 4 odf4/mcg-core-rhel9 Red Hat Self-service automation portal 2 ansible-automation-platform/automation-portal
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Hardened Images dotnet9.0
    not affected: vulnerable code not in execute path

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
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
5 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.30% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 22% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
GitHub 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm protobufjs
<7.5.6
>=8.0.0, <8.0.2
7.5.6
8.0.2
npm @protobufjs/utf8
<1.1.1
1.1.1

Affected products

  • protobufjs protobuf.js

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-176 Improper Handling of Unicode Encoding

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.