CVE-2026-47073 PUBLISHED

Unbounded memory consumption in WebSocket client in hackney

Assigner: EEF
Reserved: 18.05.2026 Published: 25.05.2026 Updated: 25.05.2026

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in benoitc hackney allows Flooding. The WebSocket client in src/hackney_ws.erl imposes no upper bound on memory consumption in three code paths. First, read_handshake_response/3 accumulates received bytes into a growing buffer with no size cap; the per-receive timeout resets on every chunk, so a server that streams bytes without ever sending \r\n\r\n causes the buffer to grow until memory is exhausted. Second, parse_payload/9 and parse_active_payload/8 do not validate the declared frame payload length against any limit; because RFC 6455 allows payload lengths up to 2^63-1 bytes, a server that announces a very large frame and dribbles bytes causes the accumulation buffer to grow until OOM. Third, the frag_buffer field in #ws_data{} accumulates continuation frames indefinitely; a server that sends an endless stream of non-final (nofin) fragmented frames without ever sending a final (fin) frame grows frag_buffer without bound.

In all three cases the attacker only needs to control the WebSocket server the hackney client connects to, with no authentication or special client configuration required.

This issue affects hackney: from 2.0.0 before 4.0.1.

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 benoitc
Product hackney
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 2.0.0 to 4.0.1 (excl.)
Vendor benoitc
Product hackney
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 690cecaf236fba49526da404a5bc889a24367a3e to ce0109e2970ace6e20ff29bae9d05c3ac22ec6dc (excl.)

Credits

  • Peter Ullrich finder
  • Benoit Chesneau remediation developer
  • Jonatan Männchen analyst

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-125 Flooding