GHSA-3j69-69wj-xqx2: UltraJSON: Malformed/Truncated UTF-8 Accepted and Silently Rewritten in ujson.dumps()
Summary
ujson.dumps() (or ujson.dump() or ujson.encode()) have a reject_bytes=False option. When set, they may accept malformed or truncated UTF-8 byte sequences, silently rewriting them into different Unicode characters instead of rejecting them. This leads to input validation bypass and data integrity issues.
Details
The expected behavior is that for x being any bytes string, x == ujson.loads(ujson.dumps(x, reject_bytes=False)).encode(errors="surrogatepass") should always either be true or ujson.dumps() will throw an exception. In reality, some strings which should've been errors are silently rewritten as other strings:
- Invalid continuation bytes are replaced with valid ones: b'\xcf\x13' -> b'\xcf\x93'
- Unterminated sequence completes the sequence: b'\xc3' -> b'\xc3\x80'
- ... or leads to reading past the end of string: b'\xf0\x90\x94' -> b"\xf0\x90\x94\x80inxcontrib'"
Impact
An application relying on reject_bytes=False for UTF-8 handling may experience:
- Data integrity issues
- Experience validation bypass if said validation occurs before serialisation
Remediation
The missing/broken UTF-8 validation checks were added/fixed in https://github.com/ultrajson/ultrajson/commit/169eaf36b1116fece5034ee79a7a0ef3f6deedcf. We recommend upgrading to UltraJSON 5.13.0.
Workarounds
Decoding bytes to strings in Python before passing them to ujson.dumps() avoids this issue.
Details
Original advisory: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-3j69-69wj-xqx2
Exploitation outlook
EPSS (FIRST.org) estimates each CVE’s probability of exploitation in the next 30 days — here is the CSIRTS.com read on those numbers.
- Low exploitation riskCVE-2026-549110.27% 30-day exploitation probability — currently an unlikely target, but scores change as exploit code circulates. Riskier than 19% of all scored CVEs.
Referenced CVEs
| CVE | CSIRTS overview | External |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2026-54911 | coverage & exploitation status | NVD · CVE.org |
More from GitHub Security Advisories
- mediumGHSA-xm43-3m56-w3wf: Ghost: Paid gift memberships obtainable at minimal cost via the donations feature2026-08-04
- mediumGHSA-chgm-3698-jm42: Ghost: Member existence leak via magic link sign-in response2026-08-04
- highGHSA-xpp7-93x6-v29m: XSS in Ghost's ActivityPub client2026-08-04
- mediumGHSA-7mpp-r37j-x5wh: Ghost: Session Fixation in Ghost Admin2026-08-04
- mediumGHSA-cjc9-q5gf-327p: Ghost: Theme Upload Path Traversal2026-08-04