Am I affected?
Description
'Elixir.Bandit.WebSocket.PerMessageDeflate':inflate/2 in lib/bandit/websocket/permessage_deflate.ex calls :zlib.inflate/2 with no output-size cap, then materializes the entire decompressed payload as a single binary via IO.iodata_to_binary/1. The websocket_options.max_frame_size option only bounds the on-the-wire (compressed) frame size, not the decompressed output. A high-ratio compressed frame (e.g. uniform data at ~1024:1 ratio) can stay well under any wire-size limit while forcing GiB-scale heap allocations in the connection process before any application code runs.
An unauthenticated attacker who can open a WebSocket connection can send a single such frame to exhaust the BEAM node's memory and trigger an OOM kill.
This vulnerability requires both Bandit's server-level websocket_options.compress and the per-upgrade compress: true option passed to WebSockAdapter.upgrade/4 to be enabled. Stock Phoenix and LiveView applications are not affected as they default to compress: false.
This issue affects bandit: from 0.5.9 before 1.11.0.
Weaknesses & attack patterns
Weakness
CWE-770
·
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
in catalog →
MITRE ↗
Attack patterns
CAPEC-130
·
Excessive Allocation
MITRE ↗
Affected — Hex / bandit Hex.pm ↗ Repository ↗
modules · source files · routines
Affected — GitHub / mtrudel/bandit Repository ↗
modules · source files · routines
Workarounds
Configurations
- Bandit's server-level websocket_options.compress is enabled (it defaults to true).
- The per-upgrade compress: true option is passed to WebSockAdapter.upgrade/4 (it defaults to false; Phoenix's default is also false).
References
GHSA-frh3-6pv6-rc8j ↗
vendor-advisory
EEF-CVE-2026-39804 ↗
related
Credits
CVSS breakdown
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