Disclosure summary
Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in Protobuf.JSON.Decode in elixir-protobuf protobuf allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to crash the decoding process via a deeply nested JSON document. Any application that decodes attacker-supplied JSON with Protobuf.JSON.decode/3, Protobuf.JSON.decode!/3, or Protobuf.JSON.from_decoded/3 into a schema that contains a self-referential or cyclic message type is affected. In lib/protobuf/json/decode.ex, the embedded-message clause of decode_singular/3 recurses into internal_from_json_data/3 once per nesting level without incrementing or checking the decoder's depth counter. The depth guard increase_depth_and_maybe_throw/1 covers only the Google.Protobuf.ListValue and Google.Protobuf.Struct clauses, so the recursion_limit option has no effect on user-defined message types. Each nesting level allocates a stack frame and heap objects, and a sufficiently deep document exhausts the memory of the decoding process. Confidentiality and integrity are not affected. This issue affects protobuf: from 0.8.0 before 0.17.1.
Source-reported weakness categories
CWE-674
Source-specific records & product guidance
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NIST NVD · NVD-CVE-2026-104635
Open original source · Updated Oct 09, 2026
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Original records & references
- NIST NVD record
- CVE Program record
- 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
- 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
- 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
- 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
- 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
Repositories cited by this CVE
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- elixir-protobuf/protobuf CVE record citation
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Discovery progress
0 of 3 discovery queries finished. GitHub returned 0 indexed results; 0 malformed or disallowed results were rejected.
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PUBLISHED 2026-10-09T09:17:07+00:00
MODIFIED 2026-10-09T17:07:31+00:00
INGESTED 2026-10-11T00:55:12+00:00