Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via memory exhaustion.

cow_spdy:inflate/2 in cowlib passes peer-supplied compressed bytes directly to zlib:inflate/2 with no output size bound. The SPDY header compression dictionary (?ZDICT) is public, and zlib compresses long runs of repeated bytes at roughly 1024:1, so a few kilobytes of SPDY frame payload can decompress to gigabytes on the BEAM heap, OOM-killing the node. A single unauthenticated SPDY frame is sufficient to trigger the condition. The parsers for syn_stream, syn_reply, and headers frame types are all affected via cow_spdy:parse_headers/2.

This issue affects cowlib from 0.1.0 before 2.16.1.

Project Subscriptions

Vendors Products
Ninenines Subscribe
Advisories

No advisories yet.

Fixes

Solution

Upgrade to cowlib 2.16.1 or later, in which the cow_spdy module has been removed entirely. No patched version of cow_spdy will be provided. Migrate away from SPDY, which has been deprecated since 2015 in favour of HTTP/2.


Workaround

No workaround given by the vendor.

History

Wed, 13 May 2026 19:15:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via memory exhaustion. cow_spdy:inflate/2 in cowlib passes peer-supplied compressed bytes directly to zlib:inflate/2 with no output size bound. The SPDY header compression dictionary (?ZDICT) is public, and zlib compresses long runs of repeated bytes at roughly 1024:1, so a few kilobytes of SPDY frame payload can decompress to gigabytes on the BEAM heap, OOM-killing the node. A single unauthenticated SPDY frame is sufficient to trigger the condition. The parsers for syn_stream, syn_reply, and headers frame types are all affected via cow_spdy:parse_headers/2. This issue affects cowlib from 0.1.0 before 2.16.1.
Title Decompression Bomb in cow_spdy:inflate/2 Allows Memory Exhaustion via Crafted SPDY Frame
First Time appeared Ninenines
Ninenines cowlib
Weaknesses CWE-409
CPEs cpe:2.3:a:ninenines:cowlib:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
Vendors & Products Ninenines
Ninenines cowlib
References
Metrics cvssV4_0

{'score': 8.2, 'vector': 'CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N'}


Projects

Sign in to view the affected projects.

cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: EEF

Published:

Updated: 2026-05-13T18:43:11.640Z

Reserved: 2026-05-04T18:23:25.574Z

Link: CVE-2026-43970

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

Status : Received

Published: 2026-05-13T19:17:25.440

Modified: 2026-05-13T19:17:25.440

Link: CVE-2026-43970

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

No data.

Weaknesses