CVE-2026-7790: Unbounded chunk-size hex digits in cowlib cause quadratic CPU and memory DoS
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.
Metrics
- CVSS v4.0
- 8.7
- Severity
- HIGH
- Fixed in
- 2.16.1
- Affected Products
- 2
- ninenines / cowlib< 2.16.1 (from 0.6.0)
- ninenines / cowlib< a4b8039ce8c93ab00867ef6b7e888822c09f4369 (from 8c0e428b012c59f553a264f285ed89d36f791e3e)
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