CVE-2026-75758
Received
Received - Intake
Uncontrolled Recursion in Elixir Standard Library
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-75758, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-08-28
Last updated on: 2026-08-28
Assigner: EEF
Description
Description
Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in the Elixir standard library allows an attacker who controls a list passed to inspect/1, List.to_string/1, or List.to_charlist/1 to exhaust a BEAM node's memory.
Inspect.List's charlist branch in lib/elixir/lib/inspect.ex classifies a list as a charlist using List.ascii_printable?/2, which examines only the first :printable_limit (4096 by default) elements, and then calls IO.chardata_to_string/1 on the whole term. A list whose printable prefix exceeds that limit but which contains a later element that is not a code point (an atom, an out-of-range integer, or an improper tail) is therefore mis-classified, and the conversion raises ArgumentError. That conversion runs inside List.to_string/1, whose rescue clause builds its message by interpolating inspect(list), which re-enters the same branch and raises again. The nested inspection is an argument to raise, so the recursion is not in tail position and every level is retained: the process stack grows monotonically while each cycle re-walks the list, until the process is killed by max_heap_size or, by default, the node runs out of memory. List.to_charlist/1 has the same rescue shape.
Below the printable limit the inner inspect/1 sees the invalid element within its counter and renders the list in ordinary bracket form, so a single ArgumentError is raised and no recursion occurs.
This issue affects elixir: from 1.15.0-rc.0 before 1.18.5, from 1.19.0-rc.0 before 1.19.6, and from 1.20.0-rc.0 before 1.20.4.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| elixir | elixir | From 1.15.0-rc.0 (inc) to 1.18.5 (exc) |
| elixir | elixir | From 1.19.0-rc.0 (inc) to 1.19.6 (exc) |
| elixir | elixir | From 1.20.0-rc.0 (inc) to 1.20.4 (exc) |
| elixir | elixir | to 1.18.5 (exc) |
| elixir | elixir | to 1.19.6 (exc) |
| elixir | elixir | to 1.20.4 (exc) |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-674 | The product does not properly control the amount of recursion that takes place, consuming excessive resources, such as allocated memory or the program stack. |
