Am I affected?
Description
When Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware.Compression is included in a Tesla middleware pipeline, HTTP response bodies are decompressed eagerly with no size limit. The decompress_body/2 function in lib/tesla/middleware/compression.ex passes the entire response body to :zlib.gunzip/1 or :zlib.unzip/1 without any cap on the output size. Additionally, compression_algorithms/1 splits the content-encoding header on commas and decompress_body/2 recurses once per token, applying a decompression pass on each iteration. A server advertising content-encoding: gzip, gzip, gzip, gzip causes four recursive decompression passes, yielding exponential amplification: each gzip layer can expand its input roughly 1000x, so a payload of a few hundred bytes on the wire inflates to gigabytes of BEAM heap, exhausting memory and crashing or freezing the calling process.
This issue affects tesla: from 0.6.0 before 1.18.3.
Weaknesses & attack patterns
Weakness
CWE-409
·
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)
in catalog →
MITRE ↗
Attack patterns
CAPEC-130
·
Excessive Allocation
MITRE ↗
Affected — Hex / tesla Hex.pm ↗ Repository ↗
modules · source files · routines
Affected — GitHub / elixir-tesla/tesla Repository ↗
modules · source files · routines
Configurations
References
GHSA-mc85-72gr-vm9f ↗
vendor-advisory
EEF-CVE-2026-48594 ↗
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