Medium severity · published Jul 16, 2026
CVE-2026-55407
Buffa: Memory Exhaustion Denial of Service in decode_unknown_field via Unbounded Allocation
6.3
CVSS
0.8%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Buffa is a pure-Rust Protocol Buffers implementation with first-class protobuf editions support. Prior to 0.8.0, the decode_unknown_field function in buffa's protobuf decoder allocated heap memory in proportion to untrusted input (unknown fields in the serialized protobuf) without enforcing an allocation budget, affecting any message decoded from untrusted input using code generated with preserve_unknown_fields=true (the default); a small, well-formed payload of nested unknown fields inside a StartGroup could trigger roughly 22x memory amplification (for example a 64 MiB input forcing about 1.4 GB of heap allocation), and length-delimited unknown fields could be sized arbitrarily, so an unauthenticated attacker could crash a process through memory exhaustion because the top-level message size cap did not account for in-decode amplification. This issue is fixed in version 0.8.0.
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.8% · higher than 55% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
BU
buffa · anthropics
< 0.8.0 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-55407
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-55407
github.com
https://github.com/anthropics/buffa/commit/278fa43fcff661d4ee6bd83b75955a153d4281fc
github.com
https://github.com/anthropics/buffa/pull/184
github.com
https://github.com/anthropics/buffa/releases/tag/v0.8.0
github.com
https://github.com/anthropics/buffa/security/advisories/GHSA-f9qc-qg88-7pq5
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