CVE-2026-43974 PUBLISHED

gun HTTP/1.1 client accepts unsolicited 101 Switching Protocols response allowing server-driven protocol hijack and OOM

Assigner: EEF
Reserved: 04.05.2026 Published: 08.06.2026 Updated: 08.06.2026

Unexpected Status Code or Return Value vulnerability in ninenines gun (gun_http module) allows a malicious HTTP server to force the client into raw protocol mode via an unsolicited 101 Switching Protocols response.

In gun_http:handle_inform/8, when a 101 Switching Protocols response is received over HTTP/1.1, the function verifies only that the Upgrade header is syntactically valid and that the stream reference is a plain reference(). It does not check whether the client ever sent an Upgrade or Connection: upgrade header on the corresponding request. Because this check is absent, any 101 response (solicited or not) causes gun to dispatch a gun_upgrade message to the caller and transition the entire connection to raw protocol mode.

A malicious or compromised HTTP server can send an unsolicited 101 response to any HTTP/1.1 request, causing the gun client to abandon HTTP framing for that connection. Once in raw mode, gun_raw applies no flow control (flow=infinity) and re-arms socket active mode after every received packet, so the server can flood the client with arbitrary bytes. These are forwarded as unbounded gun_data messages to the owner process, exhausting its mailbox and BEAM memory, ultimately crashing the VM.

This issue affects gun: from 2.0.0 before 2.4.0.

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 ninenines
Product gun
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 2.0.0 to 2.4.0 (excl.)
Vendor ninenines
Product gun
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from a3c2edbb8c807717e2f10520c6cf1e77a62eab2e to 5b48068c29ce5e112cb149b5857c7d4dc319a81b (excl.)

Credits

  • Peter Ullrich finder
  • Loïc Hoguin remediation developer

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-841 Improper Enforcement of Behavioral Workflow CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-220 Client-Server Protocol Manipulation
  • CAPEC-130 Excessive Allocation