typelevel/jawn · Security
Jawn: Uncontrolled nesting depth in JSON parser
- GHSA ID
- GHSA-cc4v-rvgp-2pf3
- CVE ID
- CVE-2026-59990
- Severity
- high
- Published
- Updated
- CVSS
- 7.5 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- CVSS v3
- 7.5 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Description
The Jawn parser before 1.6.1 is vulnerable to a denial of service attack via untrusted input.
Impact
A remote attacker who can submit JSON to any jawn-backed parse method can exhaust JVM heap and trigger java.lang.OutOfMemoryError. This is treated by Scala as a fatal error and not typically handled by scala.util.Try or cats.effect.IO.
Patches
Version 1.6.1 introduces a configurable nesting-depth limit (Parser#maxDepth, default 4096). Inputs deeper than the limit fail with a recoverable ParseException instead of exhausting heap.
Users who require deeper nesting may override maxDepth on a Parser subclass.
Workarounds
- Enforce an input size limit small enough that the resulting context stack cannot exhaust heap, (e.g. http4s
EntityLimiter). - Pre-scan untrusted input and reject documents whose maximum delimiter nesting exceeds a threshold before handing them to jawn.
CWEs
- CWE-770 · Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
References
- https://github.com/typelevel/jawn/security/advisories/GHSA-cc4v-rvgp-2pf3 ↗
- https://github.com/typelevel/jawn/commit/191cb3a44e77f1afab439ee636bf66bdf3c54a04 ↗
- https://github.com/typelevel/jawn/commit/6219666641f9408498f85868f835e17bd8a72fed ↗
- https://github.com/typelevel/jawn/commit/93ac93e9c992c11b4c03d5455d8551f9fb24da1b ↗
- https://github.com/typelevel/jawn/commit/f6ace7e0db715de1a8c4618bed9378333a5c2214 ↗
- https://github.com/typelevel/jawn/releases/tag/v1.7.0 ↗
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-cc4v-rvgp-2pf3 ↗