CVE-2026-48594 PUBLISHED

Decompression bomb in Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse and Tesla.Middleware.Compression

Assigner: EEF
Reserved: 22.05.2026 Published: 02.06.2026 Updated: 04.06.2026

Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in elixir-tesla tesla allows a denial of service via decompression bomb in HTTP response bodies.

When Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware.Compression is included in a Tesla middleware pipeline, HTTP response bodies are decompressed eagerly with no size limit. The decompress_body/2 function in lib/tesla/middleware/compression.ex passes the entire response body to :zlib.gunzip/1 or :zlib.unzip/1 without any cap on the output size. Additionally, compression_algorithms/1 splits the content-encoding header on commas and decompress_body/2 recurses once per token, applying a decompression pass on each iteration. A server advertising content-encoding: gzip, gzip, gzip, gzip causes four recursive decompression passes, yielding exponential amplification: each gzip layer can expand its input roughly 1000x, so a payload of a few hundred bytes on the wire inflates to gigabytes of BEAM heap, exhausting memory and crashing or freezing the calling process.

This issue affects tesla: from 0.6.0 before 1.18.3.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 8.2

Product Status

Vendor elixir-tesla
Product tesla
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0.6.0 to 1.18.3 (excl.)
Vendor elixir-tesla
Product tesla
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 5bd90bb5cf0d15e375edc2a66fa322292940fce2 to 340f75b5d191dc747ef7ac6365bd002d1cd55a9d (excl.)

Affected Configurations

The application must include Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware.Compression in its Tesla middleware pipeline.

Credits

  • Peter Ullrich finder
  • Yordis Prieto remediation developer
  • Jonatan Männchen analyst

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-409 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-130 Excessive Allocation