Vulnerability 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.
Related Weaknesses (CWE)
References
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-43970.html
- https://github.com/ninenines/cowlib/commit/16aad3fb9f81f5cda4d1706ff0c54237c619c
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-43970
FAQ
What is CVE-2026-43970?
CVE-2026-43970 is a documented vulnerability. 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 ...
How severe is CVE-2026-43970?
CVSS scoring is not yet available for CVE-2026-43970. Check NVD for updates.
Is there a patch for CVE-2026-43970?
Check the references section above for vendor advisories and patch information. Review vendor security bulletins for remediation guidance.