HIGH · CVSS 7.5

CVE-2024-7254 — Protocol Buffers StackOverflow DoS

Any protobuf-based RPC or serialization could be forced into deep recursion via crafted input, triggering a StackOverflowError and killing the JVM.

Affects
  • protobuf-java < 3.25.5 / 4.27.5 / 4.28.2

What an attacker does

An attacker sends a protobuf message with deeply-nested fields to any endpoint parsing protobuf. The Java protobuf library recurses during deserialization; the stack overflows; the service dies.

How to detect

Java dependency graph — protobuf-java is pulled by gRPC and many other libs.

How to fix

Upgrade protobuf-java.

How Securie catches it

Securie's Java scanner flags vulnerable protobuf-java + gRPC endpoints.

References