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High · 8.2 CVE-2026-8466 EEF-CVE-2026-8466EUVD-2026-30133GHSA-jfc2-q6qh-g5x8

Unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing causes denial of service in cowboy

Published May 13, 2026 · Updated May 14, 2026 · Assigned by EEF

Description

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in ninenines cowboy allows denial of service via unbounded buffer accumulation in multipart header parsing.

cowboy_req:read_part/3 in src/cowboy_req.erl accumulates incoming request bytes into a Buffer binary with no upper-bound check. When cow_multipart:parse_headers/2 returns more or {more, Buffer2}, the function reads up to Length bytes (default 64 KB) from the request body and recurses with the enlarged buffer. There is no equivalent of the byte_size(Acc) > Length guard present in the sibling function read_part_body/4. An unauthenticated attacker can send a multipart/form-data request whose body never yields a complete header section — for example, a body that never contains the advertised boundary delimiter, or one whose header lines never contain \r\n\r\n — and force the server process to accumulate memory linearly with the bytes the protocol layer is willing to deliver. A handful of concurrent such uploads is sufficient to exhaust BEAM memory.

This issue affects cowboy from 2.0.0 before 2.15.0.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
ninenines cowboy 2.0.0 – < 2.15.0 2.15.0

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 erlang-cowboy 2.16.1+dfsg-1 —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 erlang-cowboy No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS erlang-cowboy No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 erlang-cowboy No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS erlang-cowboy No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS erlang-cowboy No fix yet —
Show 3 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS erlang-cowboy No fix yet —
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS erlang-cowboy No fix yet —
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS erlang-cowboy No fix yet —

Azure Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Azure Linux 3 rabbitmq-server 3.13.7-5 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Hex cowboy >= 2.0.0, < 2.15.0 2.15.0 EEF-CVE-2026-8466

References