CVE-2026-39803 PUBLISHED

HTTP/1 chunked body reader ignores length cap in bandit

Assigner: EEF
Reserved: 07.04.2026 Published: 13.05.2026 Updated: 13.05.2026

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in mtrudel bandit allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via memory exhaustion.

The chunked clause of 'Elixir.Bandit.HTTP1.Socket':read_data/2 in lib/bandit/http1/socket.ex ignores the caller-supplied :length option when reading HTTP/1 chunked request bodies. Instead of capping the accumulated body at the configured limit (e.g. Plug.Parsers' default 8 MB), do_read_chunked_data!/5 buffers every received chunk into an iolist unconditionally and materializes the entire body as a single binary. The function always returns {:ok, body, ...}, so callers cannot interpose a 413 response.

Because Plug.Parsers runs before routing and authentication in the standard Phoenix endpoint, an unauthenticated attacker needs no valid route or credentials. Sending a single Transfer-Encoding: chunked POST request with an arbitrarily large body to any path causes the BEAM process to exhaust available memory and be terminated by the OS OOM killer.

The content-length path in the same function correctly enforces the limit and is not affected.

This issue affects bandit: from 1.4.0 before 1.11.1.

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 1.4.0 to 1.11.1 (excl.)
Vendor mtrudel
Product bandit
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 903e209a521bc216b9f9065c01ae9a0cac2d5a10 to ae3520dfdbfab115c638f8c7f6f6b805db34e1ab (excl.)

Credits

  • Peter Ullrich finder
  • Mat Trudel remediation developer
  • Jonatan Männchen analyst

References

Problem Types

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

Impacts

  • CAPEC-130 Excessive Allocation