CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-1941 — Google Protobuf-Cpp security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

A parsing vulnerability for the MessageSet type in the ProtocolBuffers versions prior to and including 3.16.1, 3.17.3, 3.18.2, 3.19.4, 3.20.1 and 3.21.5 for protobuf-cpp, and versions prior to and including 3.16.1, 3.17.3, 3.18.2, 3.19.4, 3.20.1 and 4.21.5 for protobuf-python can lead to out of memory failures. A specially crafted message with multiple key-value per elements creates parsing issues, and can lead to a Denial of Service against services receiving unsanitized input. We recommend upgrading to versions 3.18.3, 3.19.5, 3.20.2, 3.21.6 for protobuf-cpp and 3.18.3, 3.19.5, 3.20.2, 4.21.6 for protobuf-python. Versions for 3.16 and 3.17 are no longer updated.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2022-09-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
python/pypi
Weaknesses
CWE-1286

Affected products

  • google / protobuf-cpp
  • google / protobuf-python
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 36
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 37
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

Showing 5 representative product identities from 11 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.