CVE-2020-1901 Denial of service in WhatsApp for iOS

What is CVE-2020-1901?

CVE-2020-1901 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Facebook WhatsApp for iOS, published on 6 Oct 2020. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Receiving a large text message containing URLs in WhatsApp for iOS prior to v2.20.91.4 could have caused the application to freeze while processing the message.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-1901?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Whatsapp Whatsapp.

How do I fix CVE-2020-1901?

No fix has been published for CVE-2020-1901 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2020-1901 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-1901 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Facebook WhatsApp for iOS

• CVE-2019-3568 WhatsApp VOIP Stack Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-18426 WhatsApp Cross-Site Scripting Exploited High 8.2
• CVE-2025-55177 Meta Platforms WhatsApp Incorrect Authorization Exploited Medium 5.4
• CVE-2022-36934 Integer overflow in WhatsApp Business for Android Critical 9.8
• CVE-2021-24042 Memory corruption in WhatsApp Business for Android Critical 9.8

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-gqr2-r72f-2848.