Vulnerability in cowlib (CVE-2026-43970)
Summary
Vulnerability in cowlib (CVE-2026-43970). Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure. Mitigation: upgrade to 2.16.1 or later.
Original description
The description as published by the source.
Summary
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.
Configurations
The application must use cow_spdy:parse/2 to parse SPDY frames from an untrusted peer. cowboy itself does not use cow_spdy; only direct callers of the cow_spdy API are affected.
Solutions
Upgrade to cowlib 2.16.1 or later, in which the cow_spdy module has been removed entirely. No patched version of cow_spdy will be provided. Migrate away from SPDY, which has been deprecated since 2015 in favour of HTTP/2.
Source: NIST National Vulnerability Database NVD GitHub Advisory
Auto-generated summary
Assembled by SecPulse from the source data (CVSS, CWE, affected versions) using templates — no AI involved. Check the original description and references below for exact details.
A vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-43970 has been found in cowlib.
Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure.
What to do: upgrade cowlib to 2.16.1 or later.
If unsure, ask your IT team or search "cowlib CVE-2026-43970" on the vendor's site.
CVE-2026-43970 (cowlib) — CWE-409
Patched: 2.16.1 — apply immediately
Plan: 1) Audit SBOM/dependencies, 2) Stage→prod upgrade, 3) Add WAF/proxy monitoring on affected endpoints, 4) Hunt IOCs in logs.
Refs: see the GHSA / vendor advisory / patched release linked on this page.
A vulnerability (CWE-409) exists in cowlib.
Check the vendor advisory for the affected versions of cowlib.
Severity: ?. Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure.
Update to 2.16.1.
Until the patch is applied: disable the affected feature, apply WAF rules, or restrict access via network ACLs.
Search webserver/proxy logs for unusual request patterns matching this CVE's known IOCs. Run grep -r 'cowlib' . against your dependency files (package-lock.json, requirements.txt, go.sum) to find affected services.
Response actions
Concrete steps and command examples for SOC/SRE teams to execute in order
-
1Identify exposure identify
grep -r 'cowlib' . | grep -v node_modulesリポジトリと本番環境の依存ファイル (package-lock.json / requirements.txt / go.sum / Gemfile.lock 等) で
cowlibを grep し、稼働しているサービス・バージョンを把握する。 -
2Apply patch patch
Upgrade cowlib to 2.16.1ステージング環境で 2.16.1 に上げて回帰テスト → 本番反映。回帰テストはアプリの主要ハッピーパスを含めること。
-
3Post-deployment verification verify
Confirm patched version is live in productionパッチ適用後、ステージングで PoC または同等の悪用パターンを再現して脆弱性が閉じたことを確認。本番ではアクセスログ・WAF でアラート再発が無いか継続監視。
Affected packages
Fix status by distribution
Fixed packages published by each distribution for this CVE
- Debian DEBIAN-CVE-2026-43970 erlang-cowlib
- Ubuntu UBUNTU-CVE-2026-43970 erlang-cowlib
References
- advisory nvd.nist.gov
- package hex.pm
- package github.com
- patch github.com
- web cna.erlef.org
- web osv.dev
- web github.com