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Vulnerability · Published Oct 10, 2026 · Assigned by EEF

CVE-2026-97853Unbounded allocation in decimal Decimal.round/3 driven by the places argument enables DoS

Medium 6.9

In plain English

A medium-severity security flaw in decimal from ericmj. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.1% (higher than 3% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 4.0)6.9Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.1%top 96.8% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value vulnerability in ericmj decimal allows Denial of Service. Decimal.round/3 builds the full result for the requested number of decimal places before the context precision (34 digits by default) is applied, so its cost grows with the places argument instead of with the size of the result. For positive places it appends places zero digits to the coefficient as a charlist before converting it to an integer, and for negative places it builds a charlist of -places zero digits. A single call such as Decimal.round(Decimal.new("1.5"), -50_000_000) allocates about 5.5 GB of memory, which can exhaust available memory and get the BEAM VM killed. The oldest releases instead loop once per decimal place, consuming CPU in proportion to places. Any application that passes a user-supplied number of decimal places or scale to Decimal.round/2 or Decimal.round/3 without bounding it is exposed. The input limits added for CVE-2026-32686 do not cover the places argument. This issue affects decimal: from 0.1.0 before 3.1.2.

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
ericmj decimal 0.1.0 – before 3.1.2
ericmj decimal 05bb73eb40ddef24eda782d905766f56a3660522 – before *

Weakness: CWE-789 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

References