Vulnerability · Published Aug 30, 2026 · Assigned by EEF
CVE-2026-78228Unbounded handle_error recursion enables denial of service in AshOban triggers
Medium 5.9
In plain English
A medium-severity security flaw in ash_oban from ash-project. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 8% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
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.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| ash-project | ash_oban | 0.8.0-rc.1 – before 0.8.14 |
| ash-project | ash_oban | 5d117ed2006df7277561c69dbfd39281da6ace9f – before 851cd0e76ed882bf736fc48d10f96d037e26b5f0 |
Weakness: CWE-674 · 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
References
- https://github.com/ash-project/ash_oban/security/advisories/GHSA-94p7-498r-mrhp vendor-advisory, related
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-78228.html related
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-78228 related
- https://github.com/ash-project/ash_oban/commit/851cd0e76ed882bf736fc48d10f96d037e26b5f0 patch