CVE-2026-48853 PUBLISHED

Deserialization of Untrusted Data and Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerabilities in elixir-grpc grpc allow unauthenticated attackers to crash the BEAM node via atom table exhaustion and, when a decoded term flows into a call site that invokes it, achieve remote code execution on the server.

'Elixir.GRPC.Codec.Erlpack':decode/2 (lib/grpc/codec/erlpack.ex) calls :erlang.binary_to_term/1 on the raw gRPC message body without the :safe option, no size bound, and no type guard. Any unauthenticated peer that sends a request with Content-Type: application/grpc+erlpack can send a crafted payload that mints arbitrary new atoms (which are never garbage-collected, exhausting the bounded atom table and crashing the VM) or that encodes a fun term which, if applied anywhere downstream, executes attacker-controlled code inside the server process.

This issue affects grpc from 0.4.0 before 1.0.0.

GRPC.Codec.Erlpack must be explicitly registered as a codec on the gRPC server.

• Peter Ullrich finder
• Paulo Valente remediation developer
• Jonatan Männchen analyst

• https://github.com/elixir-grpc/grpc/security/advisories/GHSA-grp7-v8xh-rj7h
• https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-48853.html
• https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-48853
• https://github.com/elixir-grpc/grpc/commit/272a97a5ea1b46af1819f14a831fcf35fc91f992

• CWE-502 Deserialization of Untrusted Data CWE
• CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling CWE

• CAPEC-586 Object Injection
• CAPEC-231 Oversized Serialized Data Payloads