CVE-2026-27571CWE-409CWE-770

nats-server websockets are vulnerable to pre-auth memory DoS

Medium · published February 24, 2026

CVSS v3.1
5.9
EPSS
1%
Percentile
56.9
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

NATS-Server is a High-Performance server for NATS.io, a cloud and edge native messaging system. The WebSockets handling of NATS messages handles compressed messages via the WebSockets negotiated compression. Prior to versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, the implementation bound the memory size of a NATS message but did not independently bound the memory consumption of the memory stream when constructing a NATS message which might then fail validation for size reasons. An attacker can use a compression bomb to cause excessive memory consumption, often resulting in the operating system terminating the server process. The use of compression is negotiated before authentication, so this does not require valid NATS credentials to exploit. The fix, present in versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, was to bounds the decompression to fail once the message was too large, instead of continuing on. The vulnerability only affects deployments which use WebSockets and which expose the network port to untrusted end-points.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.9 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00821 · 56.9th percentile
Weaknesses
CWE-409 · Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification); CWE-770 · Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Published
2026-02-24T15:59Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 24 FEB 15:59Z
    nats-server websockets are vulnerable to pre-auth memory DoS
    cvelistv5