CVE-2026-121808
Received
Received - Intake
Memory Exhaustion via Compressed gRPC Message in Elixir gRPC
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-121808, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-11-13
Last updated on: 2026-11-13
Assigner: EEF
Description
Description
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in elixir-grpc grpc_core and grpc allows unauthenticated attackers to exhaust server memory via a compressed Erlang external term in a gRPC message body.
GRPC.Codec.Erlpack.decode/2 (grpc_core/lib/grpc/codec/erlpack.ex, and lib/grpc/codec/erlpack.ex before the package split) passes the message body to :erlang.binary_to_term/2. That function inflates a compressed term in full before it returns. The codec sets no limit on the decoded size, and its type checks run only on the decoded term. The server's max_body_size limit counts the compressed bytes of the request. A request with Content-Type: application/grpc+erlpack can therefore make the server allocate a term much larger than the request body.
This issue affects grpc: from 0.4.0 before 1.0.0; grpc_core: from 1.0.0 before 1.1.0.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
| Probability: | |
| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| elixir-grpc | grpc | From 0.4.0 (inc) to 1.0.0 (exc) |
| elixir-grpc | grpc_core | From 1.0.0 (inc) to 1.1.0 (exc) |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-409 | The product does not handle or incorrectly handles a compressed input with a very high compression ratio that produces a large output. |
