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CVE-2026-43970

Decompression Bomb in cow_spdy:inflate/2 Allows Memory Exhaustion via Crafted SPDY Frame

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 2.16.1
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: none
  • Automatable: no
  • Technical impact: partial

Summary

Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via memory exhaustion. cow_spdy:inflate/2 in cowlib passes peer-supplied compressed bytes directly to zlib:inflate/2 with no output size bound. The SPDY header compression dictionary (?ZDICT) is public, and zlib compresses long runs of repeated bytes at roughly 1024:1, so a few kilobytes of SPDY frame payload can decompress to gigabytes on the BEAM heap, OOM-killing the node. A single unauthenticated SPDY frame is sufficient to trigger the condition. The parsers for syn_stream, syn_reply, and headers frame types are all affected via cow_spdy:parse_headers/2. This issue affects cowlib from 0.1.0 before 2.16.1.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • cowlib

    From 0.1.0 · fixed in 2.16.1

  • ninenines/cowlib

    Version range not reported

References 3

cna.erlef.org

osv.dev

GitHub · ninenines/cowlib