Description
## Summary
The `negentropy` crate is vulnerable to denial-of-service through an unchecked, peer-controlled ID count in reconciliation messages.
With the `std` feature enabled, which is the default configuration, a small malformed message can trigger an enormous memory allocation and terminate the application.
## Details
When processing an `IdList` range, the reconciliation parser uses the peer-provided ID count to reserve memory before checking whether the message contains the corresponding IDs:
```rust
let mut their_elems: HashSet<Id> =
HashSet::with_capacity(num_ids as usize);
```
An attacker can declare an arbitrarily large count without supplying any IDs. The allocation occurs before the parser reaches the ID-reading loop, which would otherwise reject the truncated message.
With Rust's default allocation-error behavior, a failed allocation aborts the process rather than unwinding. Consequently, `catch_unwind` cannot contain the failure.
Both `reconcile` and `reconcile_with_ids` reach the vulnerable parser.
The patched versions validate the count against the remaining message length before allocating:
```rust
if num_ids > (query.len() / ID_SIZE) as u64 {
return Err(Error::ParseEndsPrematurely);
}
```
## Impact
An unauthenticated remote attacker can terminate an application that exposes reconciliation to untrusted peers without additional validation.
For example, a Nostr relay that forwards `NEG-OPEN` or `NEG-MSG` reconciliation payloads to the vulnerable parser can be taken down by a single client message. Clients processing messages from malicious relays are also exposed.
This specific vulnerability affects builds with the default `std` feature enabled. Builds without `std` use a `BTreeSet` and do not perform the vulnerable preallocation.
A message-size limit alone does not prevent exploitation because the malicious payload can be only a few bytes long.
## Credit
Discovered and fixed by **Alex Gleason** (<https://github.com/alexgleason>).
Affected packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected | Fixed | Record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| crates.io | negentropy | >= 0.2.0, < 0.4.4 · >= 0.5.0, < 0.5.2 | 0.4.4, 0.5.2 | RUSTSEC-2026-0365 |
References
- https://crates.io/crates/negentropy package
- https://rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2026-0365.html advisory
- https://github.com/nostrdevkit/negentropy/pull/14 web
- https://github.com/nostrdevkit/negentropy/commit/40f7290cbc5755a5ba3190279fbc848a97866280 web
- https://github.com/nostrdevkit/negentropy/commit/894a32c0ab9f3efd750b3cf06caee27b3f9c3f12 web