CVE-2023-46118 — rabbit_common
MEDIUMCVE-2023-46118 is a medium-severity (CVSS 4.9) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in rabbit_common. A fix is available for rabbit_common — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Denial of Service by publishing large messages over the HTTP API
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-46118 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
rabbit_common💧rabbit_commonReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Hex packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
RabbitMQ is a multi-protocol messaging and streaming broker. HTTP API did not enforce an HTTP request body limit, making it vulnerable for denial of service (DoS) attacks with very large messages. An authenticated user with sufficient credentials can publish a very large messages over the HTTP API and cause target node to be terminated by an "out-of-memory killer"-like mechanism. This vulnerability has been patched in versions 3.11.24 and 3.12.7.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💧Hex | rabbit_common | ≥ 3.12.0&&< 3.12.7 | 3.12.7mix deps.update rabbit_common |
| 💧Hex | rabbit_common | ≥ 3.11.0&&< 3.11.24 | 3.11.24mix deps.update rabbit_common |
Affected Products
rabbitmqvmwareDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for rabbit_common, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update rabbit_common to 3.12.7 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-46118 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17.1 for RHEL 9 | rabbitmq-server-0:3.9.10-3.el9ost | RHSA-2024:0217 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-46118 in your dependencies?
Find it across Hex, including transitive dependencies.