CVE-2026-43970
Decompression Bomb in cow_spdy:inflate/2 Allows Memory Exhaustion via Crafted SPDY Frame
Record summary
CVE-2026-43970 has a selected CVSS score of 8.2 (high).
Description
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via memory exhaustion. cow_spdy:inflate/2 in cowlib passes peer-supplied compressed bytes directly to zlib:inflate/2 with no output size bound. The SPDY header compression dictionary (?ZDICT) is public, and zlib compresses long runs of repeated bytes at roughly 1024:1, so a few kilobytes of SPDY frame payload can decompress to gigabytes on the BEAM heap, OOM-killing the node. A single unauthenticated SPDY frame is sufficient to trigger the condition. The parsers for syn_stream, syn_reply, and headers frame types are all affected via cow_spdy:parse_headers/2. This issue affects cowlib from 0.1.0 before 2.16.1.
Exploitation context
CISA SSVC decision
CISA Coordinator · SSVC 2.0.3 · Evaluated May 14, 2026 · Source: CVE List
Affected products and versions
3| Product | Source | Version range | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Default status: unaffected | CVE List | 0.1.0 to < 2.16.1 | affected |
Default status: unaffected | CVE List | fad5c0049df278cc498b6cdb519b09e845a070a8 to < 16aad3fb9f81f5cda4d1706ff0c54237c619c282 | affected |
cowlibBrowse Hex / cowlib | GitHub Advisory | 0.1.0 to < 2.16.1 · Fixed in 2.16.1 | affected |