CipherStash incident
Memory leak in CipherStash Proxy when inserting encrypted JSON
CipherStash experienced a minor incident on January 9, 2026 affecting CipherStash Proxy (CipherStash Proxy), lasting 15h 55m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Jan 09, 2026, 07:00 PM UTC
Some customers are experiencing a memory leak in CipherStash Proxy when inserting records into their databases.
- investigating Jan 10, 2026, 04:11 AM UTC
We are able to reliably replicate the issue in Proxy, and have added a test case to the Proxy integration tests that is failing. Our current hypothesis is: Proxy's mapped statement cache is not releasing older cached statements. What is the mapped statement cache in...
- investigating Jan 10, 2026, 05:05 AM UTC
We have disproved the mapped statement cache hypothesis. We are performing additional profiling to determine the source of the leak.
- investigating Jan 10, 2026, 06:21 AM UTC
Our current hypothesis is: the memory leak is in cipherstash-client We are continuing to debug the exact cause, and our current focus is on the JSON indexer
- investigating Jan 10, 2026, 07:23 AM UTC
We have validated the hypothesis, and the leak has been identified in the encrypted JSON index generation in cipherstash-client After plaintext JSON is indexed, the memory is being zeroized, but not freed We are working on a fix for it now, and will make new CipherStash...
- investigating Jan 10, 2026, 08:46 AM UTC
We have implemented a fix to cipherstash-client, and released it in 0.31.1 We have upgraded CipherStash Proxy to use cipherstash-client 0.31.1 We...
- resolved Jan 10, 2026, 10:55 AM UTC
Fix has been released in CipherStash Proxy 2.1.9. Customers using searchable encrypted JSON in CipherStash Proxy will need to upgrade to 2.1.9 to resolve this issue.