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HIGHCVE-2026-8466Published Modified CNA EEF

CVE-2026-8466: Unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing causes denial of service in cowboy

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in ninenines cowboy allows denial of service via unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing. cowboy_req:read_part/3 in src/cowboy_req.erl accumulates incoming request bytes into a Buffer binary with no upper-bound check. When cow_multipart:parse_headers/2 returns more or {more, Buffer2}, the function reads up to Length bytes (default 64 KB) from the request body and recurses with the enlarged buffer. There is no equivalent of the byte_size(Acc) > Length guard present in the sibling function read_part_body/4. An unauthenticated attacker can send a multipart/form-data request whose body never yields a complete header section — for example, a body that never contains the advertised boundary delimiter, or one whose header lines never contain \r\n\r\n — and force the server process to accumulate memory linearly with the bytes the protocol layer is willing to deliver. A handful of concurrent such uploads is sufficient to exhaust BEAM memory. This issue affects cowboy from 2.0.0 before 2.15.0.

Metrics

CVSS v4.0
8.2
Severity
HIGH
Fixed in
2.15.0
Affected Products
2

Fix available

2.15.05c6a2061b41bb5771c4659fac7d5a822dca5bafb
Patch commits
Affected packages
  • ninenines / cowboy
    < 2.15.0 (from 2.0.0)
  • ninenines / cowboy
    < 5c6a2061b41bb5771c4659fac7d5a822dca5bafb (from 917cf99e10c41676183d501b86af6e47c95afb89)
CVSS 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
CVE-2026-8466: Unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing causes denial of service in cowboy | HarborGuard CVE