CVE-2026-65623CWE-407

Quadratic CPU blow-up reassembling fragmented WebSocket messages in Bandit

High · published July 24, 2026

CVSS v4.0
8.7
EPSS
1%
Percentile
50.3
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity vulnerability in mtrudel bandit allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via CPU exhaustion during WebSocket fragment reassembly.

The size guard 'Elixir.Bandit.WebSocket.Connection':oversize_message?/2 called from handle_frame/3 in lib/bandit/websocket/connection.ex appends each non-final continuation frame to a left-nested iolist and then re-measures the entire accumulated buffer with IO.iodata_length/1 on every frame. Because the buffer grows by one element per frame and is fully re-traversed each time, reassembly work is quadratic (O(n^2)) in the number of continuation frames.

The max_fragmented_message_size limit (default 8 MB) bounds total bytes but not frame count, and each frame can carry as little as one payload byte, so an attacker can send millions of tiny continuation frames using modest bandwidth to pin a CPU core for minutes to hours. Many concurrent connections can starve the whole server of CPU, denying service to legitimate users. The WebSocket read timeout does not help, because it is an idle timeout evaluated between reads and cannot preempt the synchronous reassembly work spent inside a single callback.

This issue affects bandit: from 1.11.0 before 1.12.1.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v4.0
8.7 · HIGH
Vector
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
EPSS
0.00644 · 50.3th percentile
Weakness
CWE-407 · Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity
Published
2026-07-24T16:32Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 24 JUL 16:32Z
    Quadratic CPU blow-up reassembling fragmented WebSocket messages in Bandit
    cvelistv5