CVE-2026-7790
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ninenines cowlib (cow_http_te module) allows Excessive Allocation. The chunked transfer-encoding parser in cow_http_te accepts an unbounded number of hex digits in the chunk-size field. Each digit causes a bignum multiplication (Len * 16 + digit), so parsing N hex digits requires O(N²) CPU work and O(N) memory. Additionally, when input is drip-fed, the parser discards the accumulated length on each partial read and restarts from zero on resumption, raising the cost to O(N³). An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit this by sending an HTTP/1.1 request with Transfer-Encoding: chunked and a very long chunk-size hex string to cause denial of service through CPU exhaustion and memory amplification. This vulnerability is associated with program file src/cow_http_te.erl and program routines cow_http_te:stream_chunked/2, cow_http_te:chunked_len/4. This issue affects cowlib: from 0.6.0 before 2.16.1.
- CVSS 4.0
- 8.7
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N - CVSS 3.1
- 7.5
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H - EPSS
- 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days; higher than 37% of CVEs (scores of 2026-10-26)
- CWE
- CWE-400
- Published
- Modified
- Record from
- the NVD, synced
Affected
- ninenines:cowlib