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UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityAwaiting Analysis

CVE-2026-68496

An attacker who can have a Smile document parsed may therefore embed a single property name of unbounded length; the parser buffers the whole name in memory before returning it, whatever maxNameLength is configured to.

HIGH 7.5EPSS 0.56%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.56%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

The Smile parser in FasterXML jackson-dataformats-binary never invokes StreamReadConstraints.validateNameLength() when decoding JSON object property names, so the maxNameLength limit is not enforced for this format. SmileParser._handleLongFieldName() grows its internal name buffer through an unconstrained _growArrayTo() call and performs no length validation. An attacker who can have a Smile document parsed may therefore embed a single property name of unbounded length; the parser buffers the whole name in memory before returning it, whatever maxNameLength is configured to. Because StreamReadConstraints.maxDocumentLength is also disabled by default, nothing else bounds the name under default settings, so the only limits are the attacker's upload capacity and available heap, leading to memory exhaustion and denial of service. No privileges beyond the ability to submit data to a parsing endpoint are required, and exploitation needs only that the bytes reach SmileFactory parsing, directly or through an ObjectMapper configured with the Smile module. jackson-core's own JSON parsers enforce maxNameLength incrementally during name decoding; this gap is specific to the binary formats. maxNameLength and validateNameLength were introduced in jackson-core 2.16.0, so releases before 2.16.0 do not contain the constraint that is left unenforced. This issue is tracked together with the CBOR parser defect in the same vendor advisory, GHSA-3v8f-v6vx-fmrm, which covers both binary formats. The Smile parser defect (jackson-dataformats-binary issue #726) is CVE-2026-68496; the CBOR parser defect (issue #725) is assigned CVE-2026-68495.

CVSS 3.1
7.5 HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
0.56% probability · 46th percentile
Public exploits
None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-400, CWE-770
Source
36c7be3b-2937-45df-85ea-ca7133ea542c
EPSS trend
0%3%5%2 October 2026: 0.67%27 October 2026: 0.56%2 October 202627 October 2026

EPSS moved from 0.7% on 2 October 2026 to 0.6% on 27 October 2026.

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.