CVE-2026-43974 — gun
Fix: ninenines/gun@5b48068CVE-2026-43974 is a CWE-841 vulnerability in gun. A fix is available for gun — see the affected versions and patch details below.
gun HTTP/1.1 client accepts unsolicited 101 Switching Protocols response allowing server-driven protocol hijack and OOM
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-43974.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
Real-World Exposure
gunReal-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
Unexpected Status Code or Return Value vulnerability in ninenines gun (gun_http module) allows a malicious HTTP server to force the client into raw protocol mode via an unsolicited 101 Switching Protocols response.
In gun_http:handle_inform/8, when a 101 Switching Protocols response is received over HTTP/1.1, the function verifies only that the Upgrade header is syntactically valid and that the stream reference is a plain reference(). It does not check whether the client ever sent an Upgrade or Connection: upgrade header on the corresponding request. Because this check is absent, any 101 response (solicited or not) causes gun to dispatch a gun_upgrade message to the caller and transition the entire connection to raw protocol mode.
A malicious or compromised HTTP server can send an unsolicited 101 response to any HTTP/1.1 request, causing the gun client to abandon HTTP framing for that connection. Once in raw mode, gun_raw applies no flow control (flow=infinity) and re-arms socket active mode after every received packet, so the server can flood the client with arbitrary bytes. These are forwarded as unbounded gun_data messages to the owner process, exhausting its mailbox and BEAM memory, ultimately crashing the VM.
This issue affects gun: from 2.0.0 before 2.4.0.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💧Hex | gun | ≥ 2.0.0&&< 2.4.0 | 2.4.0mix deps.update gun |
Affected Products
gunnineninesDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for gun, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update gun to 2.4.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-43974 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-43974 in your dependencies?
Find it across Hex, including transitive dependencies.