What serious errors and vulnerabilities occurred in the Protocol Buffers (protobuf) library Review of identified vulnerabilities

Serious bugs and vulnerabilities in the Protocol Buffers (protobuf) library

Protocol Buffers (protobuf) is a popular data serialization system developed by Google. It is used to efficiently transfer structured data between various applications and services. Despite its widespread use, the Buffers protocol has some serious bugs and vulnerabilities that developers should be aware of.

1. Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (CVE-2015-5237)
   In 2015, a critical buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in the Buffers protocol. It allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the server. The vulnerability was caused by incorrect processing of large messages, which could lead to memory corruption. This vulnerability affected all versions of the Buffers protocol up to 3.0.0-beta-4.
2. Memory Leak Vulnerability (CVE-2016-2518)
   In 2016, another critical memory leak vulnerability was discovered. It occurred when serializing/deserializing messages with nested structures. This could lead to the server gradually running out of available memory, which in turn could cause a denial of service. This vulnerability affected versions of the Buffers protocol up to 3.0.0-beta-4.
3. Code injection vulnerability (CVE-2017-15499)
   In 2017, a vulnerability was discovered that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the server. It occurred when deserializing specially crafted Buffers protocol messages. This vulnerability affected protocol versions up to 3.4.0.

Updates to the Buffers protocol have been released to address these vulnerabilities. Developers are strongly recommended to use the latest stable versions of the library and regularly check for updates to resolve such critical errors.

Here is an article on serious bugs and vulnerabilities in the Protocol Buffers (protobuf) library:

The Protocol Buffers (protobuf) library, developed by Google for serializing structured data, is a widely used solution in many systems. However, like any software, protobuf is not without bugs and potential vulnerabilities. Let’s take a look at some of the major problems that have been identified in protobuf over the years.

1. Buffer Overflow and DOS Attacks (CVE-2015-5237)
   In 2015, a critical vulnerability was discovered in the C++ implementation of protobuf, which allowed an attacker to cause a buffer overflow and execute code. This issue could also be used for DoS attacks, causing applications using a vulnerable version of protobuf to crash.
2. Uninitialized Memory Leak (CVE-2021-22570)
   In early 2021, an uninitialized memory vulnerability was discovered in the Go implementation of protobuf. It allowed access to confidential data from previously allocated memory fragments. The problem occurred when parsing specially crafted protobuf messages and could lead to sensitive information being leaked.
3. Bypassing Recursion Restrictions (CVE-2022-3171)
   Relatively recently, in 2022, a logical error was identified in the implementation of protobuf in Java, which made it possible to bypass restrictions on the depth of recursion when deserializing messages. An attacker could generate a special message that causes a stack overflow and denial of service to the application.
4. Uncontrolled memory allocation (CVE-2022-1941)
   Another serious vulnerability was discovered in 2022 in the C++ implementation of protobuf. It allowed an attacker to cause uncontrolled memory allocation when processing specially crafted messages. This could lead to memory exhaustion and DoS attacks on vulnerable systems.
5. Errors in the generated code
   In addition to vulnerabilities in the protobuf implementations themselves, problems can also arise in the code generated by protobuf compilers for various languages. For example, there have been cases of incorrect code being generated, leading to segmentation faults or undefined behavior in applications that use the generated classes.

Of course, the protobuf developers try to quickly fix the errors and vulnerabilities found. However, given the widespread use of this library, the consequences of exploiting even one serious problem can be quite significant.

Therefore, when working with protobuf it is extremely important:

Regularly update the library to the latest versions with corrections.