Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-84304 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-84304 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-84304?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 4, published 1 September 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- google.golang.org/grpc (Go) <= 1.83.0, SEMVER:introduced=0,fixed=1.83.1.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-84304?
- Yes. google.golang.org/grpc (Go): upgrade to 1.83.1 or later. Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-84304 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-84304?
- Check whether you run google.golang.org/grpc (Go) at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
How to fix
- google.golang.org/grpc (Go): upgrade to 1.83.1 or later
go get google.golang.org/grpc@v1.83.1
Technical details
This vulnerability is a heap memory exhaustion (denial-of-service) issue caused by insufficient controls on per-frame memory overhead in the HTTP/2 transport layer. An unauthenticated attacker can initiate a gRPC stream and deliberately fragment a payload into millions of tiny (1-byte or similar) HTTP/2 DATA frames. Although the total payload volume remains within configured flow-control windows, each independent frame incurs memory overhead from internal tracking structures and queue allocation. By multiplexing multiple concurrent streams, an attacker can rapidly exhaust the runtime's heap memory, triggering a panic or out-of-memory kill. The root cause is the lack of buffer coalescing to merge small consecutive data buffers into larger allocations. A patch released in version 1.83.1 implements automatic receive buffer compaction—enabled by default—which coalesces small buffers into larger allocations from a shared pool, drastically reducing per-frame overhead. A temporary environment variable escape hatch (GRPC_GO_EXPERIMENTAL_ENABLE_RECEIVE_BUFFER_COMPACTION=false) is provided for emergencies but will be removed in a future release.
Affected products
- Google gRPC-Go <= 1.83.0
Identifiers
- CVE-2026-84304
- GHSA-vp52-pcj8-j9qc
- GO-2026-6348
Timeline
- 2026-08-19: disclosed
- 2026-08-19: patched: Patch merged to master branch; version 1.83.1 released
- 2026-09-01: advisory: GitHub Advisory published
References
- https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/security/advisories/GHSA-vp52-pcj8-j9qc
- https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/pull/9331
- https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/pull/9333
- https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/commit/7354d9c8debb4bcf2225bf429857078de310c176
- https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/commit/8cfeca0e1ee5ea0980dcc320e20240fa1079ec77