Summary

A potential Denial of Service issue in protobuf-java core and lite was discovered in the parsing procedure for binary and text format data. Input streams containing multiple instances of non-repeated embedded messages with repeated or unknown fields causes objects to be converted back-n-forth between mutable and immutable forms, resulting in potentially long garbage collection pauses.

Reporter: OSS Fuzz

Affected versions: This issue affects both the Java full and lite Protobuf runtimes, as well as Protobuf for Kotlin and JRuby, which themselves use the Java Protobuf runtime.

Severity

CVE-2022-3171 Medium - CVSS Score: 5.7 (NOTE: there may be a delay in publication)

Remediation and Mitigation

Please update to the latest available versions of the following packages:

protobuf-java (3.21.7, 3.20.3, 3.19.6, 3.16.3)
protobuf-javalite (3.21.7, 3.20.3, 3.19.6, 3.16.3)
protobuf-kotlin (3.21.7, 3.20.3, 3.19.6, 3.16.3)
protobuf-kotlin-lite (3.21.7, 3.20.3, 3.19.6, 3.16.3)
google-protobuf [JRuby gem only] (3.21.7, 3.20.3, 3.19.6)

Note: The fix affects both the Java runtime (full and lite) and the generated code. So if you have generated code checked in somewhere, you'll need to regenerate it using the new version.