CVE-2025-57052

9.8Critical

Published 03 Sep 2025 · NVD status: Modified · AI triage by gemini-3.8-flash

9.8Critical

Attack vector: Network
Complexity: Low
Privileges needed: None
User interaction: None
Impact: Full C/I/A compromise
Weakness: CWE-125, CWE-129

Impact

Remote unauthenticated attackers can trigger out-of-bounds access to read restricted memory or crash services by sending malformed JSON pointer strings. They only need network access to any service that parses JSON pointer strings with cJSON_Utils.

Root cause

Improper array bounds validation in decode_array_index_from_pointer in cJSON_Utils.c allows alphanumeric characters in JSON pointers to cause out-of-bounds indexing.

Affected systems

cJSON 1.5.0 through 1.7.18

CVSS v3.1 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Fix & remediation

Upgrade cJSON to a fixed version newer than 1.7.18 or apply your distribution's backported security patch. As an interim workaround, avoid passing untrusted JSON pointer strings to cJSON_Utils or validate that array indices in pointers contain only digits before parsing.

shell

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install libcjson1 libcjson-utils

AI-suggested. Run it in staging first and check it against the vendor advisory. Why?

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NVD description

cJSON 1.5.0 through 1.7.18 allows out-of-bounds access via the decode_array_index_from_pointer function in cJSON_Utils.c, allowing remote attackers to bypass array bounds checking and access restricted data via malformed JSON pointer strings containing alphanumeric characters.

References

Source: nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-57052