CVE-2026-32689

Long-poll NDJSON body splitting causes unbounded memory allocation in Phoenix

HIGH
8.7
CVSS Score
Published: May 5, 2026 at 03:17 PM UTC
Updated: October 26, 2026 at 07:10 PM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorPhoenix

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Severity
HIGH8.7
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.5%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in phoenixframework phoenix allows a denial of service via the long-poll transport's NDJSON body handling. In 'Elixir.Phoenix.Transports.LongPoll':publish/4, when a POST request is received with Content-Type: application/x-ndjson, the request body is split on newline characters using String.split/2 with no limit on the number of resulting segments. An attacker can send a body consisting entirely of newline bytes, causing a 1:1 amplification into a list of empty binaries — a 1 MB body produces approximately one million list elements, an 8 MB body approximately 8.4 million. Each element is then walked by Enum.map, materializing another list of the same size. This exhausts BEAM memory and schedulers, crashing the node and terminating all active sessions. A session token required to reach the vulnerable endpoint is freely obtainable by any client via an unauthenticated GET request to the same URL with a matching Origin header, making this attack effectively unauthenticated. This issue affects phoenix: from 1.7.0 before 1.7.22 and 1.8.6.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

All versions1.7.01.8.02674c6ea30634667f9b09966b90269393b445953
Affected range stops below 1.7.22, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 1.8.6, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitAutomatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

8.7HIGHEEF
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusDEFERRED
CWE
CWE-770

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