Vulnerability · Published May 1, 2026 · Assigned by EEF
CVE-2026-39804WebSocket permessage-deflate inflate has no output-size cap in bandit
High 8.2
In plain English
A high-severity resource allocation without limits in bandit from mtrudel. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.8% (higher than 55% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in mtrudel bandit allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via memory exhaustion when WebSocket permessage-deflate compression is enabled. 'Elixir.Bandit.WebSocket.PerMessageDeflate':inflate/2 in lib/bandit/websocket/permessage_deflate.ex calls :zlib.inflate/2 with no output-size cap, then materializes the entire decompressed payload as a single binary via IO.iodata_to_binary/1. The websocket_options.max_frame_size option only bounds the on-the-wire (compressed) frame size, not the decompressed output. A high-ratio compressed frame (e.g. uniform data at ~1024:1 ratio) can stay well under any wire-size limit while forcing GiB-scale heap allocations in the connection process before any application code runs. An unauthenticated attacker who can open a WebSocket connection can send a single such frame to exhaust the BEAM node's memory and trigger an OOM kill. This vulnerability requires both Bandit's server-level websocket_options.compress and the per-upgrade compress: true option passed to WebSockAdapter.upgrade/4 to be enabled. Stock Phoenix and LiveView applications are not affected as they default to compress: false. This issue affects bandit: from 0.5.9 before 1.11.0.
Affected products (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-770 · 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