hacnho/protobuf-systemparameterrule-parameters-dos-poc

Protocol Buffers SystemParameterRule parameters materialization DoS PoC

This repository contains a benign security research PoC for a protobuf binary artifact that drives large repeated-message materialization during google.api.system_parameter_pb2.SystemParameterRule.ParseFromString(...).

Files:

• control_one_parameter.pb
• malicious_parameters_5000000.pb
• reproduce.py

Observed behavior:

• control artifact:
  • parses successfully with one parameters entry
• malicious artifact:
  • both files are 10,000,000 bytes
  • parses successfully with 5,000,000 parameters entries
  • increases peak RSS by about 369800 kB in local clean-process replay
  • takes about 15.38x the control parse time

Tested runtime:

• protobuf==7.35.1
• Python: /usr/bin/python3

Public files:

• https://huggingface.co/hacnho/protobuf-systemparameterrule-parameters-dos-poc/resolve/main/control_one_parameter.pb
• https://huggingface.co/hacnho/protobuf-systemparameterrule-parameters-dos-poc/resolve/main/malicious_parameters_5000000.pb
• https://huggingface.co/hacnho/protobuf-systemparameterrule-parameters-dos-poc/resolve/main/reproduce.py

Reproduction:

python3 reproduce.py