CVE-2026-8466CWE-770

Unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing causes denial of service in cowboy

High · published May 13, 2026

CVSS v4.0
8.2
EPSS
1%
Percentile
43.9
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v4.0
8.2 · HIGH
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
EPSS
0.00529 · 43.9th percentile
Weakness
CWE-770 · Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Published
2026-05-13T18:26Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 13 MAY 18:26Z
    Unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing causes denial of service in cowboy
    cvelistv5