CVE-2020-1903 Denial of service in WhatsApp Business for iOS

What is CVE-2020-1903?

CVE-2020-1903 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Facebook WhatsApp Business for iOS, published on 6 Oct 2020. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

An issue when unzipping docx, pptx, and xlsx documents in WhatsApp for iOS prior to v2.20.61 and WhatsApp Business for iOS prior to v2.20.61 could have resulted in an out-of-memory denial of service. This issue would have required the receiver to explicitly open the attachment if it was received from a number not in the receiver's WhatsApp contacts.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-1903?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Whatsapp Whatsapp, Whatsapp Whatsapp Business.

How do I fix CVE-2020-1903?

No fix has been published for CVE-2020-1903 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-2020-1903 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-1903 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Facebook WhatsApp Business 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-2468-6hhw-x65x.