CVE-2026-8466
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in ninenines cowboy allows denial of service via unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing. cowboy_req:read_part/3 in src/cowboy_req.erl accumulates incoming request…
Does this matter?
High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.38%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.
Description
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in ninenines cowboy allows denial of service via unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing. cowboy_req:read_part/3 in src/cowboy_req.erl accumulates incoming request bytes into a Buffer binary with no upper-bound check. When cow_multipart:parse_headers/2 returns more or {more, Buffer2}, the function reads up to Length bytes (default 64 KB) from the request body and recurses with the enlarged buffer. There is no equivalent of the byte_size(Acc) > Length guard present in the sibling function read_part_body/4. An unauthenticated attacker can send a multipart/form-data request whose body never yields a complete header section — for example, a body that never contains the advertised boundary delimiter, or one whose header lines never contain \r\n\r\n — and force the server process to accumulate memory linearly with the bytes the protocol layer is willing to deliver. A handful of concurrent such uploads is sufficient to exhaust BEAM memory. This issue affects cowboy from 2.0.0 before 2.15.0.
- CVSS 4.0
- 8.2 HIGHCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/M
- EPSS
- 0.38% probability · 32th percentile
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-770
- Source
- 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
References
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.