Vulnerability · Published Jun 11, 2026 · Assigned by EEF

CVE-2026-53423Unauthenticated denial-of-service via BEAM atom table exhaustion in membrane_mp4_plugin

Medium 5.9

In plain English

A medium-severity resource allocation without limits in membrane_mp4_plugin from membraneframework. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.3% (higher than 17% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 4.0)5.9Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.3%top 82.8% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: poc
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in membraneframework membrane_mp4_plugin allows unauthenticated denial-of-service via BEAM atom table exhaustion. The MP4 box header parser converts each 4-byte box name to an atom using String.to_atom/1 without validation. 'Elixir.Membrane.MP4.Container.Header':parse_box_name/1 in lib/membrane_mp4/container/header.ex interns every box name encountered while 'Elixir.Membrane.MP4.Container.Header':parse/1 walks the input. BEAM atoms are never garbage-collected, so each unique attacker-controlled 4-byte name is a permanent allocation. A crafted MP4 of approximately 8 MB containing roughly 1.1 million boxes with distinct non-standard names exhausts the atom table (default ceiling around 1,048,576 atoms), aborting the entire BEAM node and taking down all applications running on it. This issue affects membrane_mp4_plugin from 0.3.0 before 0.36.7.

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
membraneframework membrane_mp4_plugin 0.3.0 – before 0.36.7
membraneframework membrane_mp4_plugin ae4bf04c393aa1562f3df3d33e20bc5cb8130de2 – before 56373d1ddc86968e55fbde795c14eeba24357b57

Weakness: CWE-770 · 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