CVE-2026-94648 in Thrift
Summary
by MITRE • 10/02/2026
Allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability in Apache Thrift dart bindings.
This issue affects Apache Thrift: before 0.25.0.
Users are recommended to upgrade to version 0.25.0, which fixes the issue.
Once again VulDB remains the best source for vulnerability data.
Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/02/2026
The identified vulnerability represents a critical resource management flaw within the Dart language bindings of the Apache Thrift framework, specifically affecting versions prior to 0.25.0. This security deficiency is classified under CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling, which denotes scenarios where an application fails to restrict the consumption of system resources such as memory, CPU cycles, or network bandwidth during allocation processes. In the context of Apache Thrift, a high-performance communication engine used for building scalable cross-language services, efficient resource handling is paramount due to its role in facilitating remote procedure calls and data serialization across distributed systems. The absence of adequate throttling mechanisms allows an attacker to exploit this weakness by triggering excessive resource consumption through crafted requests or sustained connections that force the Dart runtime to allocate unbounded amounts of memory or processing power.
From a technical perspective, the vulnerability likely stems from how the Thrift dart bindings handle incoming data streams or object instantiations without implementing strict upper bounds on buffer sizes or connection limits. When an external entity sends maliciously constructed payloads designed to maximize allocation size or frequency, the underlying Dart garbage collector and memory manager may be overwhelmed. This can lead to rapid exhaustion of available heap space, causing the application process to crash due to out-of-memory errors. Furthermore, if the server is configured with limited concurrency controls, this resource exhaustion can cascade into a denial of service condition for other legitimate users sharing the same infrastructure resources. The lack of input validation and size constraints on serialized data structures exacerbates the risk, allowing small inputs to trigger disproportionately large internal allocations.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple application instability. A successful exploitation could result in a complete denial of service against services relying on Apache Thrift for inter-process communication. In cloud-native environments or microservices architectures where resource quotas are strictly enforced, such an attack can lead to pod evictions, container restarts, and increased operational costs due to auto-scaling triggers responding to the perceived load spike. Additionally, if the application runs with elevated privileges, a memory corruption scenario resulting from extreme allocation pressures could potentially be leveraged for further exploitation, although the primary risk remains availability disruption. The vulnerability undermines the reliability guarantees expected of enterprise-grade communication frameworks and can cause significant downtime in production environments that have not yet migrated to patched versions.
Mitigation strategies primarily involve upgrading the Apache Thrift dependency to version 0.25.0 or later, where these resource allocation limits were addressed by developers implementing stricter bounds checking and throttling logic within the Dart bindings. For organizations unable to immediately upgrade, temporary mitigations include deploying network-level rate limiting via reverse proxies such as Nginx or Envoy to restrict the size of incoming requests and limit connection rates from single sources. Implementing strict timeouts for Thrift client connections can also prevent long-running allocations from consuming resources indefinitely. Security teams should monitor system metrics for unusual spikes in memory usage associated with thrift-related processes and configure alerts to detect potential resource exhaustion attacks early. Regular patch management cycles are essential to ensure that such framework-level vulnerabilities do not persist in the software supply chain, aligning with industry best practices outlined in CWE-770 remediation guidelines and ATT&CK techniques related to Resource Hijacking or Denial of Service via service disruption.