CVE-2026-55951httpc memory exhaustion via unbounded response header accumulation
- 8.2HighCVSS base score
- 0.69%Exploitation in 30 daysEPSS · top 46% of all CVEs
- NoKnown exploitednot in CISA's KEV catalog
- NonePublic exploitsnone known yet
Description
The Erlang/OTP httpc HTTP client does not enforce a limit on the total size of response headers received from a server. The max_header_size option defaults to nolimit, and httpc_response:parse_headers/6 accumulates every header into a list before the length check runs (which only fires after the terminating CRLF CRLF is received). A malicious or compromised HTTP server can send an arbitrarily large number of headers, or headers with very large values, causing the client process to allocate unbounded memory until the system runs out of memory or the BEAM VM crashes. A proof-of-concept server sending 100,000 headers of roughly 4000 bytes each caused the client VM to allocate over 13 GB of memory in under 30 seconds. Any application using httpc:request/4,5 to connect to untrusted servers is affected. No authentication is required: any server the client connects to (including via a redirect or man-in-the-middle) can trigger the exhaustion. This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 27.3.4.17, OTP 28.5.0.6, and OTP 29.0.6, corresponding to inets from 5.10 before 9.3.2.7, 9.6.2.3, and 9.7.2. Whether OTP before OTP 17.0, corresponding to inets before 5.10, is affected is unknown.
Timeline
ID reserved
By EEF
- 3 months later
· 3 months later
Published
- 2 months later
· 2 months later
Record updated
Changes after publication (a new score, a public exploit, EPSS crossing 1, 10 or 50 %, leaving KEV) are kept since November 2026; earlier ones are not known.
Scores
| Scored by | CVSS | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| EEFCNA (assigner) | 4.0 | High8.2 | 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 |
| NVDNVD · Deferred | 4.0 | High8.2 | 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/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X |
- EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)
- 0.69% · top 46% of all CVEs (14 Nov 2026)
- CISA SSVC
- Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial
The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: High 8.2.
Affected products
What to do
Workaround: * Restrict httpc to trusted servers only, and avoid using it to fetch resources from arbitrary or user-supplied URLs. * Apply operating-system memory limits (cgroups,ulimit) to contain the blast radius of a runaway client process. * Use an alternative HTTP client library that enforces a response header size limit.
References
References6
- https://github.com/erlang/otp/security/advisories/GHSA-f9fw-mg7q-4g3x (opens in a new tab)vendor-advisory
- EEF CNA record for CVE-2026-55951 (opens in a new tab)related
- OSV record EEF-CVE-2026-55951 (opens in a new tab)related
- Erlang/OTP version ordering (opens in a new tab)x_version-scheme
- Fix commit aba0fe8 in erlang/otp (opens in a new tab)patch
- Fix commit e3be1cf in erlang/otp (opens in a new tab)patch
Sources
The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.
- CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
- CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
- NVD (opens in a new tab)
- FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
- EUVD EUVD-2026-69228 (opens in a new tab)
- OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub Advisories (opens in a new tab)
- CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)
Badge for a README or a ticket
[](https://cveledger.app/cve/CVE-2026-55951)Record last updated .