CVE-2022-31116

Impact

What kind of vulnerability is it? Who is impacted?

Anyone parsing JSON from an untrusted source is vulnerable.

JSON strings that contain escaped surrogate characters not part of a proper surrogate pair were decoded incorrectly. Besides corrupting strings, this allowed for potential key confusion and value overwriting in dictionaries.

Examples:

# An unpaired high surrogate character is ignored.
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800"')
''
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800hello"')
'hello'

# An unpaired low surrogate character is preserved.
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uDC00"')
'\udc00'

# A pair of surrogates with additional non surrogate characters pair up in spite of being invalid.
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800foo bar\uDC00"')
'foo bar𐀀'

Patches

Has the problem been patched? What versions should users upgrade to?

Users should upgrade to UltraJSON 5.4.0.

From version 5.4.0, UltraJSON decodes lone surrogates in the same way as the standard library's json module does, preserving them in the parsed output:

>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800"')
'\ud800'
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800hello"')
'\ud800hello'
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uDC00"')
'\udc00'
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800foo bar\uDC00"')
'\ud800foo bar\udc00'

Workarounds

Is there a way for users to fix or remediate the vulnerability without upgrading?

Short of switching to an entirely different JSON library, there are no safe alternatives to upgrading.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in UltraJSON

UltraJSON

Security Fix(es):

UltraJSON (aka ujson) through 5.1.0 has a stack-based buffer overflow in Buffer_AppendIndentUnchecked (called from encode). Exploitation can, for example, use a large amount of indentation.(CVE-2021-45958)

UltraJSON is a fast JSON encoder and decoder written in pure C with bindings for Python 3.7+. Affected versions were found to improperly decode certain characters. JSON strings that contain escaped surrogate characters not part of a proper surrogate pair were decoded incorrectly. Besides corrupting strings, this allowed for potential key confusion and value overwriting in dictionaries. All users parsing JSON from untrusted sources are vulnerable. From version 5.4.0, UltraJSON decodes lone surrogates in the same way as the standard library's json module does, preserving them in the parsed output. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this issue.(CVE-2022-31116)

UltraJSON is a fast JSON encoder and decoder written in pure C with bindings for Python 3.7+. In versions prior to 5.4.0 an error occurring while reallocating a buffer for string decoding can cause the buffer to get freed twice. Due to how UltraJSON uses the internal decoder, this double free is impossible to trigger from Python. This issue has been resolved in version 5.4.0 and all users should upgrade to UltraJSON 5.4.0. There are no known workarounds for this issue.(CVE-2022-31117)

UltraJSON is a fast JSON encoder and decoder written in pure C with bindings for Python 3.7+. Prior to 5.12.1, when ujson.dump() writes to a file-like object and the write operation raises an exception, the serialized JSON string object is not decremented, leaking memory. Each failed write operation leaks the full size of the serialized payload. This vulnerability is fixed in 5.12.1.(CVE-2026-44660)

UltraJSON is a fast JSON encoder and decoder written in pure C with bindings for Python 3.7+. Prior to 5.13.0, ujson.dumps() (or ujson.dump() or ujson.encode()) have a reject_bytes=False option. When set, they may accept malformed or truncated UTF-8 byte sequences, silently rewriting them into different Unicode characters instead of rejecting them. This leads to input validation bypass and data integrity issues. This vulnerability is fixed in 5.13.0.(CVE-2026-54911)

Impact

What kind of vulnerability is it? Who is impacted?

Anyone parsing JSON from an untrusted source is vulnerable.

JSON strings that contain escaped surrogate characters not part of a proper surrogate pair were decoded incorrectly. Besides corrupting strings, this allowed for potential key confusion and value overwriting in dictionaries.

Examples:

# An unpaired high surrogate character is ignored.
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800"')
''
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800hello"')
'hello'

# An unpaired low surrogate character is preserved.
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uDC00"')
'\udc00'

# A pair of surrogates with additional non surrogate characters pair up in spite of being invalid.
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800foo bar\uDC00"')
'foo bar𐀀'

Patches

Has the problem been patched? What versions should users upgrade to?

Users should upgrade to UltraJSON 5.4.0.

From version 5.4.0, UltraJSON decodes lone surrogates in the same way as the standard library's json module does, preserving them in the parsed output:

>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800"')
'\ud800'
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800hello"')
'\ud800hello'
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uDC00"')
'\udc00'
>>> ujson.loads(r'"\uD800foo bar\uDC00"')
'\ud800foo bar\udc00'

Workarounds

Is there a way for users to fix or remediate the vulnerability without upgrading?

Short of switching to an entirely different JSON library, there are no safe alternatives to upgrading.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in UltraJSON

UltraJSON is a fast JSON encoder and decoder written in pure C with bindings for Python 3.7+. Affected versions were found to improperly decode certain characters. JSON strings that contain escaped surrogate characters not part of a proper surrogate pair were decoded incorrectly. Besides corrupting strings, this allowed for potential key confusion and value overwriting in dictionaries. All users parsing JSON from untrusted sources are vulnerable. From version 5.4.0, UltraJSON decodes lone surrogates in the same way as the standard library's json module does, preserving them in the parsed output. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this issue.

UltraJSON is a fast JSON encoder and decoder written in pure C with bindings for Python 3.7+. Affected versions were found to improperly decode certain characters. JSON strings that contain escaped surrogate characters not part of a proper surrogate pair were decoded incorrectly. Besides corrupting strings, this allowed for potential key confusion and value overwriting in dictionaries. All users parsing JSON from untrusted sources are vulnerable. From version 5.4.0, UltraJSON decodes lone surrogates in the same way as the standard library's json module does, preserving them in the parsed output. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this issue.

Add support for arbitrary size integers. Replace 'wchar_t' string decoding implementation with a 'uint32_t'-based one; fix handling of surrogates on decoding (CVE-2022-31116) Potential double free of buffer during string decoding - Fix memory leak on encoding errors when the buffer was resized - Integer parsing: always detect overflows - Fix handling of surrogates on encoding (CVE-2022-31117)

These are all security issues fixed in the python310-ujson-5.4.0-1.1 package on the GA media of openSUSE Tumbleweed.

These are all security issues fixed in the python311-ujson-5.10.0-1.5 package on the GA media of openSUSE Tumbleweed.

This update for python-ujson fixes the following issues:

• CVE-2022-31116: Fixed improper decoding of escaped surrogate characters (bsc#1201255).
• CVE-2022-31117: Fixed a double free while reallocating a buffer for string decoding (bsc#1201254).

It was discovered that UltraJSON incorrectly handled certain input with a large amount of indentation. An attacker could possibly use this issue to crash the program, resulting in a denial of service. (CVE-2021-45958)

Jake Miller discovered that UltraJSON incorrectly decoded certain characters. An attacker could possibly use this issue to cause key confusion and overwrite values in dictionaries. (CVE-2022-31116)

It was discovered that UltraJSON incorrectly handled an error when reallocating a buffer for string decoding. An attacker could possibly use this issue to corrupt memory. (CVE-2022-31117)

USN-6629-1 fixed vulnerabilities in UltraJSON. This update provides the corresponding updates for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Original advisory details:

It was discovered that UltraJSON incorrectly handled certain input with a large amount of indentation. An attacker could possibly use this issue to crash the program, resulting in a denial of service. (CVE-2021-45958)

Jake Miller discovered that UltraJSON incorrectly decoded certain characters. An attacker could possibly use this issue to cause key confusion and overwrite values in dictionaries. (CVE-2022-31116)

It was discovered that UltraJSON incorrectly handled an error when reallocating a buffer for string decoding. An attacker could possibly use this issue to corrupt memory. (CVE-2022-31117)