CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-32874 — UltraJSON is a fast JSON encoder and decoder written in pure C with bindings for Python 3.7+

High CVSS 7.5

UltraJSON is a fast JSON encoder and decoder written in pure C with bindings for Python 3.7+. Versions 5.4.0 through 5.11.0 contain an accumulating memory leak in JSON parsing large (outside of the range [-2^63, 2^64 - 1]) integers. The leaked memory is a copy of the string form of the integer plus an additional NULL byte. The leak occurs irrespective of whether the integer parses successfully or is rejected due to having more than sys.get_int_max_str_digits() digits, meaning that any sized leak per malicious JSON can be achieved provided that there is no limit on the overall size of the payload. Any service that calls ujson.load()/ujson.loads()/ujson.decode() on untrusted inputs is affected and vulnerable to denial of service attacks. This issue has been fixed in version 5.12.0.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-03-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
python/pypi
Weaknesses
CWE-401, CWE-772

Affected products

  • ultrajson_project / ultrajson

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.