GitHub Advisoryadvisory · Hex
GHSA-mc85-72gr-vm9f Tesla has decompression bomb on response body
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-48594
- Ecosystem
- Hex
- Packages
- tesla
- 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-409
- Reviewed
- 2026-07-10
Affected packages
• Hex tesla: >= 0.6.0, < 1.18.3 → fixed in 1.18.3
Description
Summary
Any Tesla client pipeline that includes `Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse` or `Tesla.Middleware.Compression` eagerly decompresses HTTP response bodies with no size limit. A server under attacker control (or reached via a redirect) can return a tiny gzip-encoded payload that expands into gigabytes of BEAM heap, crashing or freezing the calling process. Stacking multiple `content-encoding` tokens multiplies the amplification exponentially.
Details
`decompress_body/2` in `lib/tesla/middleware/compression.ex` passes the full response body to `:zlib.gunzip/1` or `:zlib.unzip/1` with no cap on output size. The list of codec tokens comes from splitting the `content-encoding` header on commas, and `decompress_body/2` recurses once per token. A response advertising `content-encoding: gzip, gzip, gzip, gzip` triggers four recursive decompression passes. Each gzip layer can expand its input roughly 1000x, so a 284-byte wire payload with four layers inflates to approximately 1 GB at the innermost pass, all materialised as a single binary in the caller's heap.
PoC
1. Serve an HTTP response with `content-encoding: gzip, gzip, gzip, gzip` where the body is a 1 GB block of zeros compressed through four successive gzip passes.
2. Send that response to a Tesla client whose pipeline includes `Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse`.
3. `decompress_body/2` recurses four times without any size check, materialising ~1 GB in the calling process's heap.
4. Repeated or sufficiently large requests exhaust available memory and crash or freeze the node.
Impact
High severity (CVSS v4.0: 8.2). Any application using `tesla` 0.6.0 through 1.18.2 with `Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse` or `Tesla.Middleware.Compression` in its pipeline is vulnerable. The attacker only needs to control a server the client contacts, including via redirects. Fixed in tesla 1.18.3.
Configurations
The application must include `Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse` or `Tesla.Middleware.Compression` in its Tesla middleware pipeline.
Resources
• Introduction commit: https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/commit/5bd90bb5cf0d15e375edc2a66fa322292940fce2
• Patch commit: https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/commit/340f75b5d191dc747ef7ac6365bd002d1cd55a9d
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-48594 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in elixir-tesla tesla allows a denial of service via… vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-409 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) weakness
References
- https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/security/advisories/GHSA-mc85-72gr-vm9f web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-48594 advisory
- https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/commit/340f75b5d191dc747ef7ac6365bd002d1cd55a9d web
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-48594.html web
- https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla package
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-48594 web