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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 5.9 CVE-2026-27571 BIT-nats-2026-27571EUVD-2026-8538GHSA-qrvq-68c2-7grwGO-2026-4533

nats-server websockets are vulnerable to pre-auth memory DoS

Published Feb 24, 2026 · Updated Feb 26, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

NATS-Server is a High-Performance server for NATS.io, a cloud and edge native messaging system. The WebSockets handling of NATS messages handles compressed messages via the WebSockets negotiated compression. Prior to versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, the implementation bound the memory size of a NATS message but did not independently bound the memory consumption of the memory stream when constructing a NATS message which might then fail validation for size reasons. An attacker can use a compression bomb to cause excessive memory consumption, often resulting in the operating system terminating the server process. The use of compression is negotiated before authentication, so this does not require valid NATS credentials to exploit. The fix, present in versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, was to bounds the decompression to fail once the message was too large, instead of continuing on. The vulnerability only affects deployments which use WebSockets and which expose the network port to untrusted end-points.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
nats-io nats-server < 2.11.12, >= 2.12.0-RC.1, < 2.12.3 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 nats-server 2.12.4-1 —
Debian 13 nats-server No fix yet —
Debian 12 nats-server No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 nats-server No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 nats-server No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS nats-server No fix yet —
Show 1 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu Pro 26.04 LTS nats-server No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Leap 16.0 govulncheck-vulndb 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1
openSUSE Leap 15.6 govulncheck-vulndb 0.0.20260226T182644-150000.1.149.1 SUSE-SU-2026:0757-1

Azure Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Azure Linux 3 telegraf 1.31.0-15 —
Azure Linux 2 (CBL-Mariner) telegraf 1.29.4-21 —

Wolfi

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Wolfi rolling k3s-1.32 +1 1.32.12.1-r2 —
Wolfi rolling kine 0.14.12-r1 —
Wolfi rolling nats-top 0.6.3-r14 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Go github.com/nats-io/nats-server <= 1.4.1 — GHSA-qrvq-68c2-7grw
Go github.com/nats-io/nats-server all versions — GO-2026-4533
Go github.com/nats-io/nats-server/v2 < 2.11.12 2.11.12 GHSA-qrvq-68c2-7grw
Go github.com/nats-io/nats-server/v2 >= 2.12.0-RC.1, < 2.12.3 2.12.3 GHSA-qrvq-68c2-7grw
Go github.com/nats-io/nats-server/v2 < 2.11.12 · >= 2.12.0-RC.1, < 2.12.3 2.11.12, 2.12.3 GO-2026-4533

Advisories 3

References