Decompression bomb in ezstd:decompress_using_ddict/2 allows BEAM memory exhaustion via unbounded output buffer

Overview

Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in silviucpp ezstd allows an attacker who supplies a zstd frame to ezstd:decompress_using_ddict/2 to exhaust memory and terminate the Erlang VM via a small frame that declares a very large content size.

zstd_nif_decompress_using_ddict in c_src/ezstd_nif.cc reads the frame's declared content size with ZSTD_getFrameContentSize and passes it directly to enif_make_new_binary, without the 1 GiB MAX_BUFFER_SIZE check that ezstd:decompress/1 applies before allocating. A valid 65,550-byte frame of RLE blocks declaring 2 GiB is rejected by ezstd:decompress/1 but is fully allocated and decompressed by the dictionary path. The allocation happens inside a NIF, so when it exceeds the memory available to the VM the operating system kills the whole node rather than the calling process.

This issue affects ezstd: from 1.0.5 before 1.2.5.

Affected

• ezstd >= 1.0.5 < 1.2.5
• silviucpp/ezstd >= 6730128b1d35eca02a2028671421471ff651f423 < e34f4a4f6dc18d990d1cece2d5fceef8e934a195

Remediation

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

Workarounds

Replace calls to ezstd:decompress_using_ddict/2 with the streaming API: create a context with ezstd:create_decompression_context/1 using a small output buffer, attach the dictionary with ezstd:select_ddict/2, and decompress with ezstd:decompress_streaming/2. The streaming path decompresses into the caller-sized buffer and gives up with {error, decompressor_stuck} after 1000 chunks, so a 64 KiB buffer caps a single call at 64 MiB of output. Treat that error as a rejected input. Legitimate frames whose output exceeds 1000 times the buffer size fail the same way, so size the buffer for the largest expected payload.