Resource exhaustion in Node.js Undici

CVE-2026-84890

undici's decompress interceptor decompresses response bodies according to the untrusted Content-Encoding header. While the number of content-encoding layers is capped, the total decompressed output size is unbounded and there is no configuration option to limit it. A malicious or faulty upstream can therefore return a small compressed payload, a compression bomb, that expands to hundreds of megabytes or more in client memory, an asymmetric resource consumption that can exhaust memory and crash the process. This affects undici versions from 7.15.0 up to 7.29.1 and from 8.0.0 up to 8.10.2. Users should upgrade to undici 7.29.1 or 8.10.2.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.9 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.004 (34.1th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 34th percentile — 34.1% 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-2026-84890: held from 0.003 to 0.004.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.003 · newest: 0.004 · change: +0.002

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-84890?
CVE-2026-84890 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Node.js Undici, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 5.9/10. Published 2026-09-04.
How severe is CVE-2026-84890?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.9 out of 10.