Vulnerability · Published Jul 14, 2026 · Assigned by EEF
CVE-2026-59246Zero-length HTTP/2 CONTINUATION frames bypass Mint's header-block byte-size cap and exhaust client memory
Medium 6.3
In plain English
A medium-severity resource allocation without limits in mint from elixir-mint. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.5% (higher than 43% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
Allocation of resources without limits vulnerability in elixir-mint mint allows a remote HTTP/2 server to exhaust memory on the client host and cause a denial of service. The Mint.HTTP2.handle_continuation/3 function in lib/mint/http2.ex accumulates the header-block fragment carried by each HTTP/2 CONTINUATION frame into a growing conn.headers_being_processed nesting, one level deeper per frame, and only releases it when a frame with the END_HEADERS flag arrives. The only guard on this accumulator is Mint.HTTP2.assert_header_block_within_max_size/2, which sums the byte size of the fragments received so far. Because a CONTINUATION frame is permitted by the protocol to carry a zero-length payload, an unbounded chain of zero-length CONTINUATION frames adds no bytes to the running total, never trips the size cap, and never emits END_HEADERS, yet each frame still nests the accumulator one level deeper. A malicious HTTP/2 server (reachable directly, via an attacker-controlled redirect, via SSRF, or via a man-in-the-middle) can open a stream by sending a HEADERS frame without END_HEADERS and then stream zero-length CONTINUATION frames indefinitely. Client memory grows one cons cell per frame received; sustained bandwidth from the peer drives the BEAM node running the Mint client to memory exhaustion and eventual out-of-memory termination. This issue affects mint: from 0.1.0 before 1.9.2.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| elixir-mint | mint | 0.1.0 – before 1.9.2 |
| elixir-mint | mint | 596ca4304504be68939c4929e0831557097962b8 – before 5779de1666344b32aefc4354184ea07f902f73ce |
Weakness: CWE-770 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N