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CVE-2026-59248: CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in ninenines cowlib

0
High
VulnerabilityCVE-2026-59248cvecve-2026-59248cwe-770
Published: 07/28/2026 (07/28/2026, 09:54:19 UTC)
Source: CVE Database V5
Vendor/Project: ninenines
Product: cowlib

Description

Allocation of resources without limits vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows an unauthenticated remote HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 peer to exhaust memory on the vulnerable server (or client) and cause a denial of service. The HPACK and QPACK prefixed-integer decoder cow_hpack_common:dec_big_int/3 in src/cow_hpack_common.hrl (invoked from cow_hpack:decode/2 in src/cow_hpack.erl and from cow_qpack:decode_field_section/3 in src/cow_qpack.erl) reads continuation octets until it sees one whose high bit is clear, evaluating Int + (Value bsl M) at each step with the shift M growing by seven per octet. No limit is enforced on the number of continuation octets, on the resulting bit width, or on the value; the decoder consumes whatever encoded length the peer supplies. Because Erlang integers are immutable, each intermediate Value bsl M and each accumulator update allocates a fresh bignum whose digit width grows linearly with the number of octets processed so far. Summed across the whole decode, the transient bignum digit materialization is on the order of the square of the encoded length. A single maximal HPACK indexed representation carried inside one HTTP/2 HEADERS plus one CONTINUATION frame at Cowboy's default max_frame_size_received can force hundreds of megabytes of transient allocation and garbage-collection churn before the resulting header-table index is rejected as invalid. Repeated or concurrent connections multiply the pressure and can drive the Erlang VM to memory exhaustion. Cowlib is the HTTP parser used by Cowboy, RabbitMQ's management plugin, and other Erlang and Elixir HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 servers and clients, so any exposed endpoint that accepts HPACK or QPACK from an untrusted peer is reachable. This issue affects cowlib: from 2.0.0 before 2.19.0.

CVSS v4.0

Score 8.7high

Attack Vector
Network
Attack Complexity
Low
Attack Requirements
None
Privileges Required
None
User Interaction
None
Vuln. Confidentiality
None
Vuln. Integrity
None
Vuln. Availability
High
Subsq. Confidentiality
None
Subsq. Integrity
None
Subsq. Availability
None
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Affected software

cowlib
pkg:hex/cowlib
GitHub Actionsmore threats →cve
ninenines/cowlib
pkg:github/ninenines/cowlib
CPE configurations
cpe:2.3:a:ninenines:cowlib:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

Run on your own infrastructure? Check whether these packages are installed with threat-finder — our free open-source scanner.

Technical Details

Data Version
5.2
Assigner Short Name
EEF
Date Reserved
2026-07-04T04:24:03.652Z
Cvss Version
4.0
State
PUBLISHED
Remediation Level
null

Threat ID: 6a6883049c2644c7f8720e57

Added to database: 07/28/2026, 10:23:00 UTC

Last updated: 07/28/2026, 11:06:55 UTC

Views: 5

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