CVE-2026-115701 — ninenines / cowboy
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or ThrottlingAllocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in ninenines cowboy allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust connection process memory over HTTP/1.1.
Once a request has been received in full and its handler is still running, cowboy_http:parse/2 in src/cowboy_http.erl appends every further byte that arrives on the keep-alive connection to the connection buffer and returns to the receive loop without parsing it. The socket stays in active mode and no limit applies to this buffer: max_request_line_length, max_headers and the other parser limits only take effect once the handler returns and parsing resumes, and the only timer in this state is idle_timeout (default 60 seconds), which is reset on every received chunk. A client can therefore send an arbitrary amount of data on one connection for as long as the handler runs, and a few connections to an endpoint that holds requests open can drive the Erlang VM into out-of-memory conditions.
This issue affects cowboy: from 2.18.0 onward.
| Software | Affected versions |
|---|---|
| ninenines / cowboy | >= 2.18.0 |
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A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.
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