CVE-2026-7790
Severity CVSS v4.0:
HIGH
Type:
CWE-400
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption ('Resource Exhaustion')
Publication date:
11/05/2026
Last modified:
11/05/2026
Description
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ninenines cowlib (cow_http_te module) allows Excessive Allocation.<br />
<br />
The chunked transfer-encoding parser in cow_http_te accepts an unbounded number of hex digits in the chunk-size field. Each digit causes a bignum multiplication (Len * 16 + digit), so parsing N hex digits requires O(N²) CPU work and O(N) memory. Additionally, when input is drip-fed, the parser discards the accumulated length on each partial read and restarts from zero on resumption, raising the cost to O(N³). An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit this by sending an HTTP/1.1 request with Transfer-Encoding: chunked and a very long chunk-size hex string to cause denial of service through CPU exhaustion and memory amplification.<br />
<br />
This vulnerability is associated with program file src/cow_http_te.erl and program routines cow_http_te:stream_chunked/2, cow_http_te:chunked_len/4.<br />
<br />
This issue affects cowlib: from 0.6.0 before 2.16.1.
Impact
Base Score 4.0
8.70
Severity 4.0
HIGH