CVE-2026-32689 PUBLISHED

Long-poll NDJSON body splitting causes unbounded memory allocation in Phoenix

Assigner: EEF
Reserved: 13.03.2026 Published: 05.05.2026 Updated: 05.05.2026

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in phoenixframework phoenix allows a denial of service via the long-poll transport's NDJSON body handling.

In 'Elixir.Phoenix.Transports.LongPoll':publish/4, when a POST request is received with Content-Type: application/x-ndjson, the request body is split on newline characters using String.split/2 with no limit on the number of resulting segments. An attacker can send a body consisting entirely of newline bytes, causing a 1:1 amplification into a list of empty binaries — a 1 MB body produces approximately one million list elements, an 8 MB body approximately 8.4 million. Each element is then walked by Enum.map, materializing another list of the same size. This exhausts BEAM memory and schedulers, crashing the node and terminating all active sessions.

A session token required to reach the vulnerable endpoint is freely obtainable by any client via an unauthenticated GET request to the same URL with a matching Origin header, making this attack effectively unauthenticated.

This issue affects phoenix: from 1.7.0 before 1.7.22 and 1.8.6.

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 phoenixframework
Product phoenix
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1.7.0 to 1.7.22 (excl.)
  • affected from 1.8.0 to 1.8.6 (excl.)
Vendor phoenixframework
Product phoenix
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 2674c6ea30634667f9b09966b90269393b445953 to * (excl.)

Affected Configurations

A Phoenix.Socket must be configured with the longpoll option enabled. Phoenix LiveView applications enable the longpoll transport by default via the /live socket.

Workarounds

Disable the longpoll transport on all Phoenix.Socket declarations, including the LiveView /live socket, by removing or setting longpoll: false. Note that this prevents clients that cannot use WebSockets from connecting.

Credits

  • Peter Ullrich finder

References

Problem Types

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

Impacts

  • CAPEC-130 Excessive Allocation