CVE-2026-111101 PUBLISHED

HTTP/1.1 chunked request bodies made of 1-byte chunks amplify memory use in Bandit

Assigner: EEF
Reserved: 23.10.2026 Published: 26.10.2026 Updated: 26.10.2026

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in the HTTP/1.1 chunked body reader of mtrudel bandit allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust server memory and CPU via a request body made of many 1-byte chunks.

The chunked reader in lib/bandit/http1/socket.ex keeps every chunk as its own list cell and binary term until IO.iodata_to_binary/1 joins them, and nothing limits the number of chunks. The :length option of read_body/2 counts only data bytes, so tiny chunks cost far more memory than their payload: 48 MB of 1-byte chunks grew one handler process to about 500 MB and took about 6 s of CPU. The route does not need to read the body, because on keep-alive connections ensure_completed/1 drains unread bodies through the same reader.

This issue affects bandit: from 0.1.0 before 1.14.0.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 8.7

Product Status

Vendor mtrudel
Product bandit
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0.1.0 to 1.14.0 (excl.)
Vendor mtrudel
Product bandit
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 7201270c34b90f6c9e15c0386c2bb802c0c72ab4 to 220b9dfd27f9a21305be2afc75cbe585ddc24e7a (excl.)

Workarounds

From 0.7.0, a server whose clients and proxies all speak HTTP/2 can disable HTTP/1 with http_1_options: [enabled: false], so that the vulnerable chunked body reader never runs.

Credits

  • Peter Ullrich reporter
  • Mat Trudel remediation developer
  • Jonatan Männchen / EEF analyst

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling CWE

Impacts

  • An unauthenticated client can make a single HTTP/1.1 request hold many times its body size in server memory (about 48 MB for a 1 MB body in the reporter's test), and keep CPU busy while the chunks are joined. This affects any Bandit server that accepts HTTP/1.1 requests, whether or not its routes read the body.