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Cowboy: Unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing causes denial of service in cowboyGHSA-jfc2-q6qh-g5x8

Fix: ninenines/cowboy@5c6a206

GHSA-jfc2-q6qh-g5x8 is a CWE-770 vulnerability in cowboy. A fix is available for cowboy — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Also known asCVE-2026-8466EEF-CVE-2026-8466
Published
Updated
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Nov 10, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

No confirmed exploitation observed yet

  • 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-jfc2-q6qh-g5x8.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
0.4%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs32th percentile — riskier than 32% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%0.34%0.69%1.03%0.4%0.4%Jul 26Oct 26Nov 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

Real-World Exposure

1 pkg affected
💧cowboy

Real-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

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.

Affected Packages

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
💧Hexcowboy≥ 2.0.0&&< 2.15.02.15.0mix deps.update cowboy

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency
  1. Detect

    Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for cowboy, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.

  2. Fix

    Update cowboy to 2.15.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-jfc2-q6qh-g5x8 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

  3. 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.

Frequently Asked Questions

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
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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