GitHub Advisoryadvisory · Hex
GHSA-jfc2-q6qh-g5x8 Cowboy: Unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing causes denial of service in cowboy
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-8466
- Ecosystem
- Hex
- Packages
- cowboy
- Severity
- High
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
- Weaknesses
- CWE-770
- Reviewed
- 2026-05-19
Affected packages
• Hex cowboy: >= 2.0.0, < 2.15.0 → fixed in 2.15.0
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.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-8466 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in ninenines cowboy allows denial of service via unbounded buffer… vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness