High · published June 3, 2026
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in elixir-tesla tesla allows a denial of service via decompression bomb in HTTP response bodies.
When Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware.Compression is included in a Tesla middleware pipeline, HTTP response bodies are decompressed eagerly with no size limit. The decompress_body/2 function in lib/tesla/middleware/compression.ex passes the entire response body to :zlib.gunzip/1 or :zlib.unzip/1 without any cap on the output size. Additionally, compression_algorithms/1 splits the content-encoding header on commas and decompress_body/2 recurses once per token, applying a decompression pass on each iteration. A server advertising content-encoding: gzip, gzip, gzip, gzip causes four recursive decompression passes, yielding exponential amplification: each gzip layer can expand its input roughly 1000x, so a payload of a few hundred bytes on the wire inflates to gigabytes of BEAM heap, exhausting memory and crashing or freezing the calling process.
This issue affects tesla: from 0.6.0 before 1.18.3.
| Product | Versions | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| elixir-tesla/tesla | ≥ 0.6.0, < 1.18.3 | 1.18.3 |