Decompression Bomb in cow_spdy:inflate/2 Allows Memory Exhaustion via Crafted SPDY Frame
CVE-2026-43970 is fixed in erlang-cowlib on 1 platform by DEBIAN-CVE-2026-43970 (version 2.17.1-1), released May 13, 2026. It is not reported as exploited. Patch Radar priority: Routine.
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.
Where it's fixed
| Product | Fixed in | Fix | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux | |||
| erlang-cowlib · Debian 14 | 2.17.1-1 | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-43970 | May 13, 2026 |
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