CVE-2026-43974gun HTTP/1.1 client accepts unsolicited 101 Switching Protocols response allowing server-driven protocol hijack and OOM

Official description

Unexpected Status Code or Return Value vulnerability in ninenines gun (gun_http module) allows a malicious HTTP server to force the client into raw protocol mode via an unsolicited 101 Switching Protocols response. In gun_http:handle_inform/8, when a 101 Switching Protocols response is received over HTTP/1.1, the function verifies only that the Upgrade header is syntactically valid and that the stream reference is a plain reference(). It does not check whether the client ever sent an Upgrade or Connection: upgrade header on the corresponding request. Because this check is absent, any 101 response (solicited or not) causes gun to dispatch a gun_upgrade message to the caller and transition the entire connection to raw protocol mode. A malicious or compromised HTTP server can send an unsolicited 101 response to any HTTP/1.1 request, causing the gun client to abandon HTTP framing for that connection. Once in raw mode, gun_raw applies no flow control (flow=infinity) and re-arms socket active mode after every received packet, so the server can flood the client with arbitrary bytes. These are forwarded as unbounded gun_data messages to the owner process, exhausting its mailbox and BEAM memory, ultimately crashing the VM. This issue affects gun: from 2.0.0 before 2.4.0.

Affected products (as reported)

References

• https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-43974.html related, third-party-advisory
• https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-43974 related
• https://github.com/ninenines/gun/commit/5b48068c29ce5e112cb149b5857c7d4dc319a81b patch