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
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
| CVSS | Score | Vector | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.0 | 6.9 Medium | CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N | EEF |
Weaknesses
- CWE-409 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)
Affected Products
| Product | Versions |
|---|---|
josepotatosalad |
|
josepotatosalad |
|
References
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