CVE-2026-0994
Publication date 23 January 2026
Last updated 5 February 2026
Ubuntu priority
Description
A denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability exists in google.protobuf.json_format.ParseDict() in Python, where the max_recursion_depth limit can be bypassed when parsing nested google.protobuf.Any messages. Due to missing recursion depth accounting inside the internal Any-handling logic, an attacker can supply deeply nested Any structures that bypass the intended recursion limit, eventually exhausting Python’s recursion stack and causing a RecursionError.
Status
| Package | Ubuntu Release | Status |
|---|---|---|
| protobuf | 25.10 questing |
Needs evaluation
|
| 24.04 LTS noble |
Needs evaluation
|
|
| 22.04 LTS jammy |
Needs evaluation
|
|
| 20.04 LTS focal |
Needs evaluation
|
|
| 18.04 LTS bionic |
Needs evaluation
|
|
| 16.04 LTS xenial |
Needs evaluation
|
|
| 14.04 LTS trusty |
Needs evaluation
|
Notes
mdeslaur
as of 2026-01-27, the fix has not yet been accepted into the uptream protobuf repo
allenpthuang
as of 2026-02-05, the patch has been merged into main.
References
Other references
- https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-0994
- https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/pull/25239
- https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/pull/25586 (33.x)
- https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/pull/25587 (29.x)
- https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/commit/d2b001626d137c62dfee6c88c87324102531868b