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
| Vendor | Product | Affected | Fixed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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.
Debian
Security tracker ↗| Release | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian 14 | erlang-cowboy | 2.16.1+dfsg-1 | — |
Ubuntu
Security tracker ↗| Release | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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)Fewer releases
| Release | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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
| Release | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Azure Linux 3 | rabbitmq-server | 3.13.7-5 | — |
Affected packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected | Fixed | Record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hex | cowboy | >= 2.0.0, < 2.15.0 | 2.15.0 | EEF-CVE-2026-8466 |
References
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-8466.html related third-party-advisory
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-8466 related
- https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy/commit/5c6a2061b41bb5771c4659fac7d5a822dca5bafb patch