CVE-2016-4303

critical

Published 2016-09-26 · Modified 2026-05-06

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CVSS v3

9.8

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

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

9.8

Description

The parse_string function in cjson.c in the cJSON library mishandles UTF8/16 strings, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or execute arbitrary code via a non-hex character in a JSON string, which triggers a heap-based buffer overflow.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

97%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

SUSE Affected 2 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
42.1	Affected	—
13.2	Affected	—

Debian Mixed 6 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`3.1.3-1`
sid	Fixed	`3.1.3-1`
forky	Fixed	`3.1.3-1`
bullseye	Fixed	`3.1.3-1`
bookworm	Fixed	`3.1.3-1`
8.0	Affected	—

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions	Fixed
es	iperf3	`{"startIncluding":"3.0","endExcluding":"3.0.12"}`	`3.0.12`
novell	suse_package_hub_for_suse_linux_enterprise	`12`

References

CWEs

CWE-120

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.