ESP32 serial stream freezing - arduino

Question

I have a master device and ESP32 acting as a slave, communicating directly over UART with RX/TX cables. I've created a task that checks the serial stream every 50 ms and parses the data. My problem is that the serial stream freezes up, seemingly randomly, and only restarts if the master or the slave are restarted.
The task looks as such:
void TaskListen_UART(void *pvParameters)
{
while (true)
{
if (readSerialIn())
{
slaveRunCommand(serialData.command); // Execute received commmand
}
vTaskDelay(50 / portTICK_PERIOD_MS);
}
}
It checks the serial stream through readSerialIn() which looks like the following:
bool readSerialIn()
{
if (UART.available() > 0) // Check if the Serial port received data
{
serialData.clearStruct(); // Clear previously saved data
if (UART.find(0x2A)) // Find "*" // Find starting delimiter
{
serialData.length = UART.read(); // Read length
if (serialData.length > BYTE_BUFFER_LEN)
{
writeSerialNACK(); // Write NACK if length seems incorrect
return false;
}
Serial.printf(("Message length: %d\n"), serialData.length);
serialData.checksum = UART.read(); // Read Checksum
Serial.printf(("Checksum: %d\n"), serialData.checksum);
if (parseBuffer(serialData.length)) // Parse the data
{
if (serialData.checkSum()) // If the checksum passes
{
serialData.assignBuffer(); // Save the parsed data to the global buffer
return true;
}
else
{
writeSerialNACK();
return false;
}
}
else
false;
}
else
return false;
}
}
The parseBuffer() function is what actually reads the stream and parses it into their according values on the slave. I tried to write it in the most fail-safe fashion, but it still hasn't cleared up my issue.
bool parseBuffer(uint8_t bufferLength)
{
uint8_t bufferPos = 0;
bool uartDetectFlag = false;
while (UART.available() > 0)
{
uartDetectFlag = true;
if (bufferPos < bufferLength)
{
serialData.serialBuffer[bufferPos] = UART.read();
}
bufferPos++;
}
if (uartDetectFlag)
return true;
else
return false;
}
At first I was suspicious that the ESP was trying to access a block in memory that doesn't exist. I noticed however that it doesn't reset itself like it normally would if that were the case, and I tried writing parseBuffer in a non-blocking manner. I also tried increasing the task delay to 100 ms, which reduced the frequency of the blocking but did not suffice in terms of speed. Regardless, it freezes up and (I think) it's caused by a large flow of data through the serial stream.