CVE-2026-54500

Description

Oj (Optimized JSON) is a JSON parser and Object marshaller packaged as a Ruby gem. In versions prior to 3.17.3, Oj.load in :object mode reads uninitialized stack memory (and, for long keys, reads out of bounds) when parsing a JSON object whose key is 254 bytes or longer. The interned bytes can surface to the caller, disclosing process stack memory. In ext/oj/intern.c, form_attr() handles the long-key path by allocating a heap buffer, `b`, populating it with the attribute name, and then freeing it — but it passed the uninitialized stack buffer buf (not b) to rb_intern3(). rb_intern3 therefore reads len + 1 bytes of uninitialized stack memory. When the key length is >= 256, it also reads out of bounds past the 256-byte buf. The resulting bytes are interned and can reach the caller via the produced Symbol or via the EncodingError message raised on invalid UTF-8, leaking process stack contents. This issue has been fixed in version 3.17.3.

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Severity score breakdown

CVSS version: CVSS v3.0

References

• MITRE
• NVD
• Launchpad
• Debian

Other references

• https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-54500
• https://github.com/ohler55/oj/security/advisories/GHSA-fm7p-mprw-wjm9