CVE-2026-55407

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

Published Jul 16, 2026 CVSS 4.0 · 6.3 Medium EPSS < 1% KEV · Not listed
Description
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.

Remediation

No solution or workaround provided in the CVE record

Tracking

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Advisories

Source ID Title
Github GHSA Github GHSA GHSA-f9qc-qg88-7pq5 Buffa Vulnerable to Memory Exhaustion Denial of Service in decode_unknown_field via Unbounded Allocation
History
Type Values Removed Values Added
First Time appeared Anthropics
Anthropics buffa
Vendors & Products Anthropics
Anthropics buffa
Type Values Removed Values Added
Metrics ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'no', 'Exploitation': 'none', 'Technical Impact': 'partial'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description 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.
Title Buffa: Memory Exhaustion Denial of Service in decode_unknown_field via Unbounded Allocation
Weaknesses CWE-400
CWE-770
CWE-789
References
Metrics cvssV4_0

{'score': 6.3, 'vector': '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'}

Weaknesses

Sources

Status
PUBLISHED
Assigner
GitHub_M
Published
Updated
Jul 16, 2026, 6:04 PM
Reserved
Jun 16, 2026, 9:48 PM
Status
Deferred
Published
Jul 16, 2026, 5:16 PM
Modified
Oct 24, 2026, 8:10 PM