Description
Unexpected Status Code or Return Value vulnerability in ninenines gun (gun_http module) allows a malicious HTTP server to force the client into raw protocol mode via an unsolicited 101 Switching Protocols response.
In gun_http:handle_inform/8, when a 101 Switching Protocols response is received over HTTP/1.1, the function verifies only that the Upgrade header is syntactically valid and that the stream reference is a plain reference(). It does not check whether the client ever sent an Upgrade or Connection: upgrade header on the corresponding request. Because this check is absent, any 101 response (solicited or not) causes gun to dispatch a gun_upgrade message to the caller and transition the entire connection to raw protocol mode.
A malicious or compromised HTTP server can send an unsolicited 101 response to any HTTP/1.1 request, causing the gun client to abandon HTTP framing for that connection. Once in raw mode, gun_raw applies no flow control (flow=infinity) and re-arms socket active mode after every received packet, so the server can flood the client with arbitrary bytes. These are forwarded as unbounded gun_data messages to the owner process, exhausting its mailbox and BEAM memory, ultimately crashing the VM.
This issue affects gun: from 2.0.0 before 2.4.0.
Affected products
| Vendor | Product | Affected | Fixed |
|---|---|---|---|
| ninenines | gun | 2.0.0 – < 2.4.0 | 2.4.0 |
Affected packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected | Fixed | Record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hex | gun | >= 2.0.0, < 2.4.0 | 2.4.0 | EEF-CVE-2026-43974 |
References
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-43974.html related third-party-advisory
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-43974 related
- https://github.com/ninenines/gun/commit/5b48068c29ce5e112cb149b5857c7d4dc319a81b patch