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High · 8.7 CVE-2026-93471 EEF-CVE-2026-93471EUVD-2026-108052GHSA-3gv4-v3m4-w3vp

Unbounded SAML message decompression in esaml allows memory exhaustion

Published Oct 22, 2026 · Updated Oct 30, 2026 · Assigned by EEF

Description

Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) in esaml_binding in dropbox esaml allows an unauthenticated attacker to exhaust server memory and crash the Erlang VM via a crafted compressed SAMLResponse.

esaml_binding:decode_response/2 base64-decodes the attacker-supplied SAMLResponse, inflates it with zlib:unzip/1 with no bound on the output, then converts the result to a charlist with binary_to_list/1 before parsing. This runs on the SAML consume (ACS) and single-logout endpoints, which accept unauthenticated requests by design, and it runs before any signature check. A small deflate stream reaches a compression ratio near 1000 to 1, so a request body of tens of kilobytes inflates to hundreds of megabytes and then to several gigabytes of list heap, so a few requests exhaust memory and take the node down.

This issue affects esaml: from 0.1.0 onward.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
handnot2 esaml — —
arekinath esaml — —
dropbox esaml 0.1.0 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Hex esaml >= 0.1.0 — EEF-CVE-2026-93471

References