CVE-2026-43970

high

Description

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.

References

https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-43970

https://github.com/ninenines/cowlib/commit/16aad3fb9f81f5cda4d1706ff0c54237c619c282

https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-43970.html

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2026-05-13

Updated: 2026-05-14

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 5

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Severity: Medium

CVSS v3

Base Score: 7.5

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Severity: High

CVSS v4

Base Score: 8.2

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

Severity: High

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00139