CVE-2026-54500

Oj (Optimized JSON) is a JSON parser and Object marshaller packaged as a Ruby gem. In versions prior to 3.17.3, Oj.load in :object mode reads uninitialized stack memory (and, for long keys, reads out of bounds) when parsing a JSON object whose key is 254 bytes or longer. The interned bytes can surface to the caller, disclosing process stack memory. In ext/oj/intern.c, form_attr() handles the long-key path by allocating a heap buffer, `b`, populating it with the attribute name, and then freeing it — but it passed the uninitialized stack buffer buf (not b) to rb_intern3(). rb_intern3 therefore reads len + 1 bytes of uninitialized stack memory. When the key length is >= 256, it also reads out of bounds past the 256-byte buf. The resulting bytes are interned and can reach the caller via the produced Symbol or via the EncodingError message raised on invalid UTF-8, leaking process stack contents. This issue has been fixed in version 3.17.3.

No published remediation has been found for this vulnerability's affected products yet.

Mitigation guidance may be in the linked vendor advisories in the References section below.