Home/CVE/Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows unauthenticate
CVE

CVE-2026-43970

Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows unauthenticate

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.

EPSS 0.00183
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  • No active-exploitation, high-EPSS, or public-exploit signals - routine patching cadence
Sigma rules0 YARA rules0

Affected Packages

1
Language-ecosystem packages (from OSV) tied to this CVE, with the version that fixes it - the dependency-level detail NVD doesn’t carry.
Hex cowlib HIGH fixed in 2.16.1

Scoring & Timeline

Published to NVD13 May 2026 · 07:17 PM
SSVC triage · cisa-vulnrichment
Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
SSVC asks the questions that actually drive patch urgency: is it being exploited, can attacks be automated, and how total is the impact.

Vendor Advisories

1
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References & Sources

3
Source URLs (vendor pages, mailing lists, write-ups). Exploit/PoC links are in their own section above to avoid duplication.
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