CVE-2022-1941: Debian Linux

High severity, CVSS 7.5. EPSS: 1.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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 Versions for 3.16 and 3.17 are no longer updated.

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 10.0 only
• Fedoraproject Fedora: version 36 only; version 37 only
• Google Protobuf-Cpp: before 3.18.3 (fixed in 3.18.3); from 3.19.0, before 3.19.5 (fixed in 3.19.5); from 3.20.0, before 3.20.2 (fixed in 3.20.2); from 3.21.0, before 3.21.6 (fixed in 3.21.6)
• Google Protobuf-Python: before 3.18.3 (fixed in 3.18.3); from 3.19.0, before 3.19.5 (fixed in 3.19.5); from 3.20.0, before 3.20.2 (fixed in 3.20.2); from 4.0.0, before 4.21.6 (fixed in 4.21.6)

Published 2022-09-22. Last modified 2026-06-17.