CVEvulnerability
CVE-2026-32688
8.7 HIGH
Official page ↗
- Status
- Analyzed
- Published
- 2026-04-27
- Last modified
- 2026-10-26
- Assigner
- 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
- CVSS 4.0 (6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db)
- 8.7 HIGH — 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/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X
- CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
- 7.5 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-770
Description
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in elixir-plug plug_cowboy allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via atom table exhaustion.
Plug.Cowboy.Conn.conn/1 in lib/plug/cowboy/conn.ex calls String.to_atom/1 on the value returned by :cowboy_req.scheme/1. For HTTP/2 connections, cowlib passes the client-supplied :scheme pseudo-header value through verbatim without validation. Each unique value permanently allocates a new entry in the BEAM atom table. Since atoms are never garbage-collected and the atom table has a fixed limit (default 1,048,576), an unauthenticated attacker can exhaust the table by sending HTTP/2 requests with unique :scheme values, causing the Erlang VM to abort with system_limit and taking down the entire node.
This vulnerability does not affect HTTP/1.1, where cowboy derives the scheme from the listener type rather than from a client-supplied header.
This issue affects plug_cowboy: from 2.0.0 before 2.8.1.
Affected configurations
• elixir-plug plug.cowboy (>= 2.0.0 < 2.8.1)
Related
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness
References
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-32688.html Third Party Advisory
- https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug_cowboy/commit/bfb34cb45eb354e56437f7023fb306de1bf9c19b Patch
- https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug_cowboy/security/advisories/GHSA-q8x4-x7mp-5vg2 Vendor Advisory
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-32688 Third Party Advisory