published September 30, 2026
Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value, Allocation of Resources Without Limits, and Uncontrolled Recursion in the Java implementation of Apache PLC4X (PLC4J) allow a malicious or impersonated device to exhaust the memory or stack of the client application, causing a denial of service.
In the OPC UA driver these defects are reachable before authentication: the offending data is parsed while the secure channel and session are being established, before the server's identity has been bound to it. Configuring a trusted server therefore does not prevent exploitation by an attacker who can
impersonate it.
The individual defects are:
- Length-prefixed byte strings are allocated at the size claimed on the wire before the length is checked against the data actually received (0.10.0 through 0.13.1).
- Array fields in generated protocol parsers pre-allocate a list with the element count claimed on the wire, allowing a single count field to trigger a multi-gigabyte allocation. This parser is shared by all PLC4J drivers; the OPC UA driver is the verified pre-authentication path (0.10.0 through 0.13.1).
- The OPC UA driver accumulates message chunks without enforcing the negotiated maximum chunk count and message size (0.12.0 through 0.13.1).
- The OPC UA driver pre-allocates collections using element counts received from the server (0.10.0 through 0.13.1).
- Recursive protocol types are parsed without a nesting-depth limit. The same defect in the Go implementation is covered by CVE-2026-102510 https://cveprocess.apache.org/cve5/CVE-2026-102510 .
This issue affects Apache PLC4X: from 0.10.0 before 1.0.0.
Users are recommended to upgrade to version 1.0.0, which fixes the issue.