CVE 8.7 HIGH

gun HTTP/1.1 response buffer has no size limit allowing server-controlled memory exhaustion_CVE-2026-43973

8.7 / 10
HIGH
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Description

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ninenines gun (gun_http module) allows a malicious server to exhaust client memory via unbounded HTTP/1.1 response buffering.

In gun_http:handle/5, three clauses accumulate incoming TCP data into the connection's buffer field using binary concatenation with no upper-bound check: the head clause appends data until the \r\n\r\n header terminator is found; the body_chunked clause appends data whenever cow_http_te:stream_chunked/2 returns a more result indicating an incomplete chunk boundary; and the body_trailer clause appends data until the trailing \r\n\r\n is found. In each case, when the expected terminator never arrives, the enlarged binary is stored back into state and the process waits for more data, with no configurable or hard-coded ceiling on buffer size.

A malicious or compromised server can exploit this by sending a partial response that never completes. For example, a response may begin with HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nX-Pad: followed by an unbounded stream of arbitrary bytes, never sending the header terminator. The gun connection process will continuously append the incoming data to its buffer, causing unbounded heap growth. Because BEAM imposes no per-process heap limit by default, a single malicious connection can exhaust all available memory on the node, causing a node-wide out-of-memory crash.

This issue affects gun: from 1.0.0 before 2.4.0.

AI Analysis

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ninenines gun allowing a malicious server to exhaust client memory via unbounded HTTP/1.1 response buffering

Basic Information

ID CVE-2026-43973
Source EEF
Published Jun 8, 2026 at 14:12
Modified Jun 8, 2026 at 14:16

Affected Product

Vendor ninenines
Product gun
Version 1.0.0
Affected Versions ninenines gun 1.0.0
ninenines gun 11dfe71f4b9aedaaedea2ad3b2f32fd006a8480f

CWE Classification

AI Assessment

AI Score 8.7 / 10
AI Severity High
Vendor ninenines
Product gun
Version 1.0.0-2.3.0

References

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