GHSA-6983-jfq8-485w is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-770 vulnerability in phoenix. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-6983-jfq8-485w is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Phoenix: Unbounded channel joins per transport enables DoS over few connections
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 GHSA-6983-jfq8-485w.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-6983-jfq8-485w plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 367,996 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
phoenix💧phoenix💧phoenix💧phoenixReal-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
Summary
Phoenix transports do not limit the number of channels in a given connection, making it easy to spawn hundreds of thousands of processes over a single connection, and, eventually reaching the max processes VM limit. The solution is to limit the number of channels per transport, so an attacker needs to start new HTTP/WebSocket connections, allowing third-party services to apply rate limits and intervene more easily.
Impact
An unauthenticated remote attacker can cause a denial of service against any Phoenix app that exposes LongPoll/WebSocket transports.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💧Hex | phoenix | ≥ 0.11.0&&< 1.5.15 | 1.5.15 |
| 💧Hex | phoenix | ≥ 1.6.0-rc.0&&< 1.6.17 | 1.6.17 |
| 💧Hex | phoenix | ≥ 1.7.0-rc.0&&< 1.7.24 | 1.7.24 |
| 💧Hex | phoenix | ≥ 1.8.0-rc.0&&< 1.8.9 | 1.8.9 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for phoenix. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update phoenix to 1.5.15 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-6983-jfq8-485w 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.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether GHSA-6983-jfq8-485w is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to GHSA-6983-jfq8-485w. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-6983-jfq8-485w in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-6983-jfq8-485w across Hex dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.