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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.3

CVE-2026-55407 json

Buffa: Memory Exhaustion Denial of Service in decode_unknown_field via Unbounded Allocation

published 2026-07-16 3 mo ago modified 2026-10-24 15 d ago also GHSA-f9qc-qg88-7pq5 , EUVD-2026-44951

cvss
6.3
version 4.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.8%
EPSS 0.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 55%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Buffa is a pure-Rust Protocol Buffers implementation with first-class protobuf editions support. Prior to 0.8.0, 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, affecting any message decoded from untrusted input using code generated with preserve_unknown_fields=true (the default); a small, well-formed payload of nested unknown fields inside a StartGroup could trigger roughly 22x memory amplification (for example a 64 MiB input forcing about 1.4 GB of heap allocation), and length-delimited unknown fields could be sized arbitrarily, so an unauthenticated attacker could crash a process through memory exhaustion because the top-level message size cap did not account for in-decode amplification. This issue is fixed in version 0.8.0.

Patch / fix

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
3 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.76% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 55% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 4.0 6.3 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
CNA 4.0 6.3 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/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
crates.io buffa
<0.8.0
0.8.0

Affected products

  • anthropics buffa

Classification

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

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.