Description
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in mtrudel bandit allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via memory exhaustion when WebSocket permessage-deflate compression is enabled.
'Elixir.Bandit.WebSocket.PerMessageDeflate':inflate/2 in lib/bandit/websocket/permessage_deflate.ex calls :zlib.inflate/2 with no output-size cap, then materializes the entire decompressed payload as a single binary via IO.iodata_to_binary/1. The websocket_options.max_frame_size option only bounds the on-the-wire (compressed) frame size, not the decompressed output. A high-ratio compressed frame (e.g. uniform data at ~1024:1 ratio) can stay well under any wire-size limit while forcing GiB-scale heap allocations in the connection process before any application code runs.
An unauthenticated attacker who can open a WebSocket connection can send a single such frame to exhaust the BEAM node's memory and trigger an OOM kill.
This vulnerability requires both Bandit's server-level websocket_options.compress and the per-upgrade compress: true option passed to WebSockAdapter.upgrade/4 to be enabled. Stock Phoenix and LiveView applications are not affected as they default to compress: false.
This issue affects bandit: from 0.5.9 before 1.11.0.
Affected products
| Vendor | Product | Affected | Fixed |
|---|---|---|---|
| mtrudel | bandit | 0.5.9 – < 1.11.0 | 1.11.0 |
Affected packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected | Fixed | Record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hex | bandit | >= 0.5.9, < 1.11.0 | 1.11.0 | EEF-CVE-2026-39804 |
| Hex | bandit | >= 0.5.8, < 1.11.0 | 1.11.0 | GHSA-frh3-6pv6-rc8j |