Vulnerability · Published May 13, 2026 · Assigned by EEF
CVE-2026-39803HTTP/1 chunked body reader ignores length cap in bandit
High 8.7
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 0.6% (higher than 51% 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. The chunked clause of 'Elixir.Bandit.HTTP1.Socket':read_data/2 in lib/bandit/http1/socket.ex ignores the caller-supplied :length option when reading HTTP/1 chunked request bodies. Instead of capping the accumulated body at the configured limit (e.g. Plug.Parsers' default 8 MB), do_read_chunked_data!/5 buffers every received chunk into an iolist unconditionally and materializes the entire body as a single binary. The function always returns {:ok, body, ...}, so callers cannot interpose a 413 response. Because Plug.Parsers runs before routing and authentication in the standard Phoenix endpoint, an unauthenticated attacker needs no valid route or credentials. Sending a single Transfer-Encoding: chunked POST request with an arbitrarily large body to any path causes the BEAM process to exhaust available memory and be terminated by the OS OOM killer. The content-length path in the same function correctly enforces the limit and is not affected. This issue affects bandit: from 1.4.0 before 1.11.1.
Affected products (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-770 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N