Cowboy HTTP/1.1 Unbounded Buffering of Pipelined Data During Request Handling Enables Memory Exhaustion

Overview

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in ninenines cowboy allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust connection process memory over HTTP/1.1.

Once a request has been received in full and its handler is still running, cowboy_http:parse/2 in src/cowboy_http.erl appends every further byte that arrives on the keep-alive connection to the connection buffer and returns to the receive loop without parsing it. The socket stays in active mode and no limit applies to this buffer: max_request_line_length, max_headers and the other parser limits only take effect once the handler returns and parsing resumes, and the only timer in this state is idle_timeout (default 60 seconds), which is reset on every received chunk. A client can therefore send an arbitrary amount of data on one connection for as long as the handler runs, and a few connections to an endpoint that holds requests open can drive the Erlang VM into out-of-memory conditions.

This issue affects cowboy: from 2.18.0 onward.

Affected

• cowboy >= 2.18.0 < *
• ninenines/cowboy >= faf5594fbf74530ace90b0c46c936bdc2cf82081 < 3a630c07e1521abf63a1b9ea080509aa1337b60d

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.