---
id: CVE-2026-48594
title: >-
  Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability
  in elixir-tesla tesla allows a denial of service via decompression bomb in
  HTTP response bodies.


  When Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware…
summary: >-
  Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability
  in elixir-tesla tesla allows a denial of service via decompression bomb in
  HTTP response bodies.


  When Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware…
severity: high
cvss: 7.5
cvssVector: 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H'
cwe:
  - CWE-409
vendor: elixir-tesla
product: tesla
affected:
  - 'tesla >= 0.6.0, < 1.18.3'
patched:
  - tesla 1.18.3
published: '2026-06-02'
updated: '2026-09-24'
sourceUpdated: '2026-09-24T21:17:12.963'
source: NVD
sourceUrl: 'https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-48594'
references:
  - url: 'https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-48594.html'
    label: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
  - url: >-
      https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/commit/340f75b5d191dc747ef7ac6365bd002d1cd55a9d
    label: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
  - url: >-
      https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/commit/5bd90bb5cf0d15e375edc2a66fa322292940fce2
    label: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
  - url: >-
      https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/security/advisories/GHSA-mc85-72gr-vm9f
    label: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
  - url: 'https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-48594'
    label: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
  - url: >-
      https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/security/advisories/GHSA-mc85-72gr-vm9f
    label: 134c704f-9b21-4f2e-91b3-4a467353bcc0
  - url: 'https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-48594'
  - url: 'https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-mc85-72gr-vm9f'
tags:
  - nvd
  - cve.org
  - ghsa
  - erlang
ssvc:
  exploitation: none
  automatable: 'no'
  technicalImpact: partial
  timestamp: '2026-06-03T14:39:48.594599Z'
scores:
  nvd: 7.5
  cna: 8.2
epss: 0.00455
epssPercentile: 0.39333
aliases:
  - GHSA-mc85-72gr-vm9f
ecosystem: erlang
ingestedAt: '2026-07-10T00:54:12.242Z'
---

## Overview

Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in elixir-tesla tesla allows a denial of service via decompression bomb in HTTP response bodies.

When Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware.Compression is included in a Tesla middleware pipeline, HTTP response bodies are decompressed eagerly with no size limit. The decompress_body/2 function in lib/tesla/middleware/compression.ex passes the entire response body to :zlib.gunzip/1 or :zlib.unzip/1 without any cap on the output size. Additionally, compression_algorithms/1 splits the content-encoding header on commas and decompress_body/2 recurses once per token, applying a decompression pass on each iteration. A server advertising content-encoding: gzip, gzip, gzip, gzip causes four recursive decompression passes, yielding exponential amplification: each gzip layer can expand its input roughly 1000x, so a payload of a few hundred bytes on the wire inflates to gigabytes of BEAM heap, exhausting memory and crashing or freezing the calling process.

This issue affects tesla: from 0.6.0 before 1.18.3.

## Affected

- `tesla >= 0.6.0, < 1.18.3`

## Remediation

Upgrade past the affected range:

- `tesla 1.18.3`

## Package advisory (CVE-2026-48594)

Affected packages:

- `tesla >= 0.6.0, < 1.18.3`

Patched in:

- `tesla 1.18.3`

Source: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-mc85-72gr-vm9f