Vulnerability advisory

GHSA-jfc2-q6qh-g5x8

Cowboy: Unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing causes denial of service in cowboy

Published Updated OSV record ↗

Also known as CVE-2026-8466EEF-CVE-2026-8466

Severity
  • CVSS 4.0CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Affected versions

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.

References

  • Codex
  • Claude Code
  • VS Code
  • GitHub Copilot
  • Cursor
  • Cline
  • Windsurf
  • Google Anti-gravity
  • OpenCode
  • Pi
  • Gemini CLI
  • Hermes Agent
  • Zed
  • Junie
  • Qwen Code
  • Kiro
  • Kilo Code
  • Factory Droid

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