Bug 2508635

Summary: CVE-2026-67216 cjson: Denial of Service due to inefficient JSON object comparison [epel-all]
Product: [Fedora] Fedora EPEL Reporter: Joel Chamberlain <jochambe>
Component: cjsonAssignee: Jonathan Wright <jonathan>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: epel10CC: jonathan
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security, SecurityTracking
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Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard: {"flaws": ["14c8b02e-d86f-4e54-8a77-52c05a5e0716"]}
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Joel Chamberlain 2026-07-29 20:04:04 UTC 
Disclaimer: Community trackers are created by Red Hat Product Security team on a best effort basis. Package maintainers are required to ascertain if the flaw indeed affects their package, before starting the update process.

cJSON through 1.7.19 contains an inefficient algorithmic complexity flaw in cJSON_Compare(). When comparing objects, the function recurses into each shared subtree twice, once in each direction, with no depth guard, making the running time exponential in nesting depth. A small, deeply nested document of a few hundred bytes (depth around 40) compared for equality consumes hours of CPU, and the cost roughly doubles with each additional level of nesting. An application that calls cJSON_Compare() on attacker-influenced JSON that is structurally equal to a reference document is exposed to a denial-of-service condition.