A severe vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-54472, has been identified in Apache bRPC versions prior to 1.14.1, posing a high risk to production environments. Classified as “important” in severity, the flaw originates from the Redis protocol parser within bRPC, which fails to validate integer values received from network packets before allocating memory. This oversight enables attackers to send specially crafted packets containing excessively large integers, triggering unlimited memory allocation and causing a bad_alloc error that terminates the service. The issue impacts both bRPC deployments acting as Redis servers with untrusted clients and Redis clients connecting to potentially compromised servers, significantly increasing the attack surface for internet-facing instances.

The vulnerability is exploitable through network-only access, making it especially dangerous for services exposed to untrusted environments. Although Apache bRPC version 1.14.0 attempted to mitigate the problem by adding memory allocation limits, a critical flaw in the implementation left the door open for exploitation via integer overflow conditions. This allowed attackers to bypass the limits using different integer ranges, meaning version 1.14.0 remained vulnerable. The discovery and responsible disclosure of this issue are credited to Researcehr, whose findings underscore the importance of rigorous validation when handling untrusted input in network protocols.

From an operational standpoint, the vulnerability’s primary impact is Denial of Service (DoS), where targeted services crash instantly upon exploitation. This can disrupt critical workflows, particularly in large-scale distributed environments relying on bRPC for Redis operations. The attack vector’s simplicity, requiring no authentication or prior access, means that any exposed bRPC instance configured for Redis communication is at immediate risk. Organizations handling high-throughput or mission-critical Redis traffic are urged to treat this issue with urgency, as exploitation could be automated for widespread service disruption.

Mitigation is straightforward but essential. The recommended approach is upgrading to Apache bRPC 1.14.1, which implements robust bounds checking and introduces a default maximum allocation limit of 64MB per Redis parser operation, adjustable via the redis_max_allocation_size gflag. For environments unable to perform an immediate upgrade, Apache has released a security patch that can be manually applied. However, organizations must review their operational requirements, as legitimate requests exceeding the new limit could fail without proper tuning. Given the ease of exploitation and the potential for severe downtime, applying the fix either via upgrade or patch should be considered a top priority for all affected deployments.