PT-2026-40763 · Cowboy · Cowboy

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CVE-2026-8466

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Published

2026-05-13

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Updated

2026-05-20

CVSS v4.0

8.2

High

VectorAV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Name of the Vulnerable Software and Affected Versions cowboy versions 2.0.0 through 2.14.x
Description An issue in multipart header parsing allows an unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service via unbounded buffer accumulation. The function read part() in src/cowboy req.erl accumulates incoming request bytes into a Buffer binary without an upper-bound check. When parse headers() returns more data, the function continues to read and recurse with an enlarged buffer. By sending a multipart/form-data request that never yields a complete header section—such as one missing the boundary delimiter or the `
sequence—an attacker can force the server to accumulate memory linearly, potentially exhausting BEAM memory with a few concurrent uploads. This occurs when an HTTP endpoint callsread part/1,2` to process request bodies.
Recommendations Update to version 2.15.0 or later. As a temporary workaround, restrict access to endpoints that process multipart/form-data request bodies using the read part() function.

Exploit

Fix

DoS

Allocation of Resources Without Limits

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Weakness Enumeration

Related Identifiers

CVE-2026-8466
GHSA-468C-VQ7P-GH64
GHSA-JFC2-Q6QH-G5X8

Affected Products

Cowboy