CVE-2026-78228 PUBLISHED

Unbounded handle_error recursion enables denial of service in AshOban triggers

Assigner: EEF
Reserved: 30.08.2026 Published: 30.08.2026 Updated: 30.08.2026

Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in ash-project ash_oban allows a user who can drive a trigger's on_error action to fail on the final attempt to exhaust worker CPU and memory, denying service.

The generated worker's atomic handle_error/4 runs the trigger's on_error action on a job's final attempt inside a rescue that, when the action itself raises, calls handle_error/4 again with the same job. The job's attempt still equals max_attempts, so it re-enters the same clause and re-runs the failing action, with no exit. Any deterministic on_error failure (a data-layer outage, a misconfigured action, or a record the action rejects) loops forever; because the recursive call is not in tail position, each iteration retains a formatted stacktrace and the process heap grows without bound while the failing statement is re-issued against the data layer until the runtime kills the worker.

This issue affects ash_oban: from 0.8.0-rc.1 before 0.8.14.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 5.9

Product Status

Vendor ash-project
Product ash_oban
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0.8.0-rc.1 to 0.8.14 (excl.)
Vendor ash-project
Product ash_oban
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 5d117ed2006df7277561c69dbfd39281da6ace9f to 851cd0e76ed882bf736fc48d10f96d037e26b5f0 (excl.)

Affected Configurations

A trigger must declare an on_error action and run through the atomic worker branch. An attacker needs only to drive that on_error action into a deterministic failure (for example by pushing the record into a state the action rejects) and let the job reach its final attempt.

Credits

  • Peter Ullrich finder
  • Peter Ullrich reporter
  • Zach Daniel / Ash Project remediation developer
  • Jonatan Männchen / EEF coordinator

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-674 Uncontrolled Recursion CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-130 Excessive Allocation