Vulnerability in Ninenines Cowlib

CVE-2026-43970

Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via memory exhaustion. cow_spdy:inflate/2 in cowlib passes peer-supplied compressed bytes directly to zlib:inflate/2 with no output size bound. The SPDY header compression dictionary (?ZDICT) is public, and zlib compresses long runs of repeated bytes at roughly 1024:1, so a few kilobytes of SPDY frame payload can decompress to gigabytes on the BEAM heap, OOM-killing the node. A single unauthenticated SPDY frame is sufficient to trigger the condition. The parsers for syn_stream, syn_reply, and headers frame types are all affected via cow_spdy:parse_headers/2. This issue affects cowlib from 0.1.0 before 2.16.1.

Published · last modified .

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.006 (49.5th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 50th percentile — 49.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-43970: held from 0.005 to 0.006.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.006 · change: +0.001

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References