CVE-2026-65627

Decompression bomb via unbounded zlib:inflate in jose_jwe_zip:uncompress/2

State
Published
Severity
6.9 Medium
Published
Oct 26, 2026
Updated
Oct 26, 2026
Reserved
Jul 22, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in potatosalad jose (erlang-jose) allows a remote attacker to exhaust a node's memory with a small crafted JWE token.

The jose_jwe_zip:uncompress/2 function in src/jwe/jose_jwe_zip.erl decompresses the DEFLATE-compressed plaintext of a JWE that carries the optional zip: DEF header by calling zlib:inflate/2 on the entire attacker-controlled stream, with no bound on the output size or the inflation ratio. Raw DEFLATE reaches ratios around 1000:1 on highly repetitive input, so a few-kilobyte token inflates to hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes in a single call.

Decompression runs automatically during decryption through jose_jwe:block_decrypt/2 (JOSE.JWE.block_decrypt/2 in Elixir), before the recipient can inspect or reject the payload. With the common asymmetric key-management algorithms (RSA-OAEP, ECDH-ES) an attacker needs only the recipient's public key to craft such a token, so no authentication or secret material is required. A single small token can exhaust the node's memory and crash the BEAM, denying service to all users.

This issue affects jose: from 1.0.0 before 1.11.13.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
4.06.9 MediumCVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:NEEF

Weaknesses

  • CWE-409 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)

Affected Products

ProductVersions
josepotatosalad
  • 1.0.0 to before 1.11.13Affected
josepotatosalad
  • a7746ecd4950f85a393136e449a91dac62b5c429 to before 857eb8e7f2d33e2c9ca2189e77226561cacaf2adAffected

References

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