VulnerabilityPublished 14 Aug 2025Updated 4 Nov 2025

CVE-2025-54472: Apache bRPC · Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Affects Apache bRPCSource CVE Database V5

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 7.5 High.

Data as of 26 Oct 2026, 14:05 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score

7.5High

How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

EPSS: 1.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 69% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.

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

Attack Vector: Network
Attack Complexity: Low
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: None
Scope: Unchanged
Confidentiality: None
Integrity: None
Availability: High

Bold values are the worst case: easiest to exploit or largest impact.

Attack Vector: Network: The vulnerable component is bound to the network stack and the set of possible attackers extends beyond the other options listed, up to and including the entire Internet. Such a vulnerability is often termed 'remotely exploitable' and can be thought of as an attack being exploitable at the protocol level one or more network hops away (e.g., across one or more routers).
Attack Complexity: Low: Specialized access conditions or extenuating circumstances do not exist. An attacker can expect repeatable success against the vulnerable component.
Privileges Required: None: The attacker is unauthorized prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files to carry out an attack.
User Interaction: None: The vulnerable system can be exploited without any interaction from any user.
Scope: Unchanged: An exploited vulnerability can only affect resources managed by the same security authority. In this case, the vulnerable component and the impacted component are either the same, or both are managed by the same security authority.
Confidentiality: None: There is no loss of confidentiality within the impacted component.
Integrity: None: There is no loss of integrity within the impacted component.
Availability: High: There is total loss of availability, resulting in the attacker being able to fully deny access to resources in the impacted component; this loss is either sustained (while the attacker continues to deliver the attack) or persistent (the condition persists even after the attack has completed). Alternatively, the attacker has the ability to deny some availability, but the loss of availability presents a direct, serious consequence to the impacted component (e.g., the attacker cannot disrupt existing connections, but can prevent new connections; the attacker can repeatedly exploit a vulnerability that, in each instance of a successful attack, leaks a only small amount of memory, but after repeated exploitation causes a service to become completely unavailable).

Definitions: FIRST CVSS v3.1 specification.

Exploitation evidence

Disclosed: evidence found.
CVE published 14 Aug 2025
Detectable: no evidence on record.
No public nuclei template indexed
Weaponised: no evidence on record.
No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB
Exploited in the wildExploited: no evidence on record.
Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation
Observed by OffSeq MirageSeen by Mirage: no evidence on record.
No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 26 Oct 2026.

Disclosed: The CVE record is public on cve.org. Its publication is t = 0.
Detectable: A public nuclei template can find exposed instances, for defenders and attackers alike.
Weaponised: Public exploit code exists in Metasploit or Exploit-DB, or CISA SSVC or the CVSS exploit maturity reports a public proof of concept.
Exploited in the wild: CISA KEV lists it, CISA SSVC rates exploitation active, or a source reports attacks.
Observed by OffSeq Mirage: OffSeq Mirage honeypot sensors recorded attack traffic for this CVE, or found exposed hosts without attack traffic.

Moments are spaced evenly, not to scale; a dashed line marks a gap of six months or more. Deltas count from t = 0. Sources that give only a date (CISA KEV, Exploit-DB, or a time of exactly 00:00Z) read “same day” rather than hours. Metasploit modules carry the flaw’s disclosure date, not their release date, and nuclei templates carry no date, so both appear above but not on the timeline.

What to do

Affected software

Product	Affected	Fixed in
Apache Software Foundation Apache bRPC	Affected =0	Fixed in–

AI-suggested

European organizations should immediately assess their use of Apache bRPC, particularly in Redis-related deployments. The primary mitigation is to upgrade all bRPC instances to version 1.14.1 or later, which contains a robust fix for the uncontrolled memory allocation issue. If upgrading is not immediately feasible, organizations should apply the official patch from the Apache bRPC GitHub repository (PR #3050) to enforce memory allocation limits. It is critical to review and adjust the redis_max_allocation_size configuration flag if legitimate Redis requests or responses exceed the default 64MB limit to avoid service disruptions post-patch. Network-level mitigations include restricting access to bRPC services to trusted clients only, implementing strict firewall rules, and deploying intrusion detection/prevention systems to monitor for anomalous Redis protocol traffic. Additionally, organizations should conduct thorough testing in staging environments to validate the patch and configuration changes before production deployment. Monitoring service logs for memory allocation errors or crashes can help detect attempted exploitation. Finally, maintaining up-to-date software inventories and vulnerability management processes will ensure timely response to similar future threats.

Description

Unlimited memory allocation in redis protocol parser in Apache bRPC (all versions < 1.14.1) on all platforms allows attackers to crash the service via network. Root Cause: In the bRPC Redis protocol parser code, memory for arrays or strings of corresponding sizes is allocated based on the integers read from the network. If the integer read from the network is too large, it may cause a bad alloc error and lead to the program crashing. Attackers can exploit this feature by sending special data packets to the bRPC service to carry out a denial-of-service attack on it. The bRPC 1.14.0 version tried to fix this issue by limited the memory allocation size, however, the limitation checking code is not well implemented that may cause integer overflow and evade such limitation. So the 1.14.0 version is also vulnerable, although the integer range that affect version 1.14.0 is different from that affect version < 1.14.0. Affected scenarios: Using bRPC as a Redis server to provide network services to untrusted clients, or using bRPC as a Redis client to call untrusted Redis services. How to Fix: we provide two methods, you can choose one of them: 1. Upgrade bRPC to version 1.14.1.2. Apply this patch ( https://github.com/apache/brpc/pull/3050 ) manually. No matter you choose which method, you should note that the patch limits the maximum length of memory allocated for each time in the bRPC Redis parser. The default limit is 64M. If some of you redis request or response have a size larger than 64M, you might encounter error after upgrade. For such case, you can modify the gflag redis_max_allocation_size to set a larger limit.

Impact

For European organizations, this vulnerability poses a significant risk to the availability of services relying on Apache bRPC for Redis protocol communication. A successful exploitation can cause service crashes and denial-of-service, disrupting critical applications such as caching layers, session stores, or distributed data processing that depend on Redis interactions through bRPC. This can lead to operational downtime, degraded user experience, and potential cascading failures in microservices architectures. Organizations in sectors with high reliance on real-time data processing, financial services, telecommunications, and cloud service providers are particularly vulnerable. Additionally, if bRPC is exposed to untrusted networks or external clients without proper network segmentation or filtering, the attack surface increases substantially. The vulnerability does not impact confidentiality or integrity directly but can indirectly affect business continuity and service reliability. Given the ease of remote exploitation without authentication, the threat is elevated for any European entity using affected versions of bRPC in production environments.

Summary

CVE-2025-54472 is a vulnerability classified under CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption) and CWE-190 (Integer Overflow) affecting Apache bRPC, a high-performance RPC framework developed by the Apache Software Foundation. The flaw exists in the Redis protocol parser component of bRPC versions before 1.14.1, where memory allocation for arrays or strings is determined by integers read directly from network packets. If an attacker sends a specially crafted Redis protocol message with an excessively large integer value, the parser attempts to allocate an unbounded amount of memory, which can cause a bad_alloc error or crash the service, resulting in a denial-of-service condition. The initial attempt to fix this in version 1.14.0 introduced a memory allocation limit, but due to improper integer overflow checks, the limitation could be bypassed, leaving that version vulnerable as well. The vulnerability applies both when bRPC is used as a Redis server accepting requests from untrusted clients and when used as a Redis client connecting to untrusted Redis servers. The patch introduced caps the maximum memory allocation per request to 64MB by default, configurable via the redis_max_allocation_size flag to accommodate legitimate large requests. Exploitation requires no authentication or user interaction and can be performed remotely over the network, making it a critical availability risk. No known exploits are reported in the wild yet, but the vulnerability is publicly disclosed and rated with a CVSS 3.1 score of 7.5, indicating high severity.

CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (opens in a new tab)
Class weaknessLikelihood of exploit: High
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
MITRE discourages mapping vulnerabilities to this broad entry; the root cause is usually a more specific weakness.
Architecture and Design
Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place.
Architecture and Design
Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or; uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed.
Architecture and Design
Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
OWASP Cheat Sheets
File Upload (opens in a new tab)
OWASP ASVS 4.0.3
V12.1.1 (opens in a new tab)
Attack patterns
XML Ping of the Death (opens in a new tab)
Regular Expression Exponential Blowup (opens in a new tab)
Sustained Client Engagement (opens in a new tab)
From MITRE CWE, MITRE CAPEC and OWASP (Top 10, OpenCRE).
CWE-190Integer Overflow or Wraparound (opens in a new tab)
Base weaknessLikelihood of exploit: Medium
The product performs a calculation that can produce an integer overflow or wraparound when the logic assumes that the resulting value will always be larger than the original value. This occurs when an integer value is incremented to a value that is too large to store in the associated representation. When this occurs, the value may become a very small or negative number.
Requirements
Ensure that all protocols are strictly defined, such that all out-of-bounds behavior can be identified simply, and require strict conformance to the protocol.
Requirements · Language Selection
Use a language that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
Architecture and Design · Libraries or Frameworks
Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
OWASP Cheat Sheets
XML Security (opens in a new tab)
Mass Assignment (opens in a new tab)
OWASP ASVS 4.0.3
V5.4.3 (opens in a new tab)
V13.3.1 (opens in a new tab)
V5.1.4 (opens in a new tab)
Attack patterns
Forced Integer Overflow (opens in a new tab)
From MITRE CWE, MITRE CAPEC and OWASP (Top 10, OpenCRE).

References

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Exploitation evidence

What to do

Affected software

Description

AI analysisMachine-generated, updated 4 Nov 2025, 22:07 UTC

WeaknessesCWE-400, CWE-190

Technical details

References

Community reviews

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