CVE-2026-43868

Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value vulnerability in Apache Thrift.

This issue affects Apache Thrift: before 0.23.0.

Users are recommended to upgrade to version 0.23.0, which fixes the issue.

Affected versions of the thrift crate size a buffer directly from an attacker-controlled 4-byte length read off the wire, before reading any payload and with no upper bound, allowing a hostile peer to force a large eager allocation or an immediate abort (denial of service, CWE-400 / CWE-789). This is the Rust implementation's instance of the CVE-2020-13949 pattern, published by the Apache Thrift PMC as CVE-2026-43868.

Details

In TBinaryInputProtocol::read_bytes (src/protocol/binary.rs), the length is read as a i32 from the transport and cast straight to usize to size a zeroing buffer before any payload is read:

fn read_bytes(&mut self) -> crate::Result<Vec<u8>> {
    let num_bytes = self.transport.read_i32::<BigEndian>()? as usize; // length from the wire
    let mut buf = vec![0u8; num_bytes];                               // unbounded eager allocation
    self.transport.read_exact(&mut buf).map(|_| buf).map_err(From::from)
}

There is no check that num_bytes is non-negative or that it fits within the data actually available:

• A length of 0x7FFFFFFF forces a ~2 GiB allocation; 0x20000000 forces 512 MiB; and so on, from only a 4-byte input.
• A negative length casts to a huge usize (up to usize::MAX), causing an immediate allocation failure / abort.

read_string routes through read_bytes, so string fields are affected the same way. The sink is reachable from any peer sending binary-protocol data, so this is an unauthenticated, network-reachable denial of service.

The fix

From thrift 0.23.0 onward, read_bytes goes through read_binary_len, which rejects negative sizes and enforces TConfiguration::max_string_size (default 100 MiB), alongside default message, frame, and recursion limits.

A separate, related gap on the non-strict message-name path was published as CVE-2026-58389 and fixed in 0.24.0; this advisory covers the read_bytes unbounded allocation (CVE-2026-43868), fixed in 0.23.0.

Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value vulnerability in Apache Thrift. This issue affects Apache Thrift: before 0.23.0. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 0.23.0, which fixes the issue.

Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value vulnerability in Apache Thrift.

This issue affects Apache Thrift: before 0.23.0.

Users are recommended to upgrade to version 0.23.0, which fixes the issue.