Uncontrolled recursion in the json2pb component in Apache bRPC (version < 1.15.0) on all platforms allows remote attackers to make the server crash via sending deep recursive json data.
Root Cause:
The bRPC json2pb component uses rapidjson to parse json data from the network. The rapidjson parser uses a recursive parsing method by default. If the input json has a large depth of recursive structure, the parser function may run into stack overflow.
Affected Scenarios:
Use bRPC server with protobuf message to serve http+json requests from untrusted network. Or directly use JsonToProtoMessage to convert json from untrusted input.
How to Fix:
(Choose one of the following options)
1. Upgrade bRPC to version 1.15.0, which fixes this issue.
2. Apply this patch: https://github.com/apache/brpc/pull/3099
Note:
No matter which option
you choose, you should know that the fix introduces a recursion depth limit with default value 100. It affects these functions:
ProtoMessageToJson, ProtoMessageToProtoJson, JsonToProtoMessage, and ProtoJsonToProtoMessage.
If your requests contain json or protobuf messages that have a depth exceeding the limit, the request will be failed after applying the fix. You can modify the gflag json2pb_max_recursion_depth to change the limit.
CVSS Score
7.5
EPSS Score
0.006
Published
2025-12-01
Unlimited memory allocation in redis protocol parser in Apache bRPC (all versions < 1.14.1) on all platforms allows attackers to crash the service via network.
Root Cause: In the bRPC Redis protocol parser code, memory for arrays or strings of corresponding sizes is allocated based on the integers read from the network. If the integer read from the network is too large, it may cause a bad alloc error and lead to the program crashing. Attackers can exploit this feature by sending special data packets to the bRPC service to carry out a denial-of-service attack on it.
The bRPC 1.14.0 version tried to fix this issue by limited the memory allocation size, however, the limitation checking code is not well implemented that may cause integer overflow and evade such limitation. So the 1.14.0 version is also vulnerable, although the integer range that affect version 1.14.0 is different from that affect version < 1.14.0.
Affected scenarios: Using bRPC as a Redis server to provide network services to untrusted clients, or using bRPC as a Redis client to call untrusted Redis services.
How to Fix: we provide two methods, you can choose one of them:
1. Upgrade bRPC to version 1.14.1.
2. Apply this patch ( https://github.com/apache/brpc/pull/3050 ) manually.
No matter you choose which method, you should note that the patch limits the maximum length of memory allocated for each time in the bRPC Redis parser. The default limit is 64M. If some of you redis request or response have a size larger than 64M, you might encounter error after upgrade. For such case, you can modify the gflag redis_max_allocation_size to set a larger limit.
CVSS Score
7.5
EPSS Score
0.002
Published
2025-08-14