{"id":78276,"date":"2026-05-11T22:46:29","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T19:16:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/cve-2026-7790-unbounded-chunk-size-hex-digits-in-cowlib-cause-quadratic-cpu-and-memory-dos\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T22:46:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T19:16:29","slug":"cve-2026-7790-unbounded-chunk-size-hex-digits-in-cowlib-cause-quadratic-cpu-and-memory-dos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/cve-2026-7790-unbounded-chunk-size-hex-digits-in-cowlib-cause-quadratic-cpu-and-memory-dos\/","title":{"rendered":"CVE-2026-7790 &#8211; Unbounded chunk-size hex digits in cowlib cause quadratic CPU and memory DoS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>CVE ID :CVE-2026-7790<\/p>\n<p>  Published : May 11, 2026, 7:16 p.m. | 43\u00a0minutes ago<\/p>\n<p>  Description :Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ninenines cowlib (cow_http_te module) allows Excessive Allocation.<\/p>\n<p>The chunked transfer-encoding parser in cow_http_te accepts an unbounded number of hex digits in the chunk-size field. Each digit causes a bignum multiplication (Len * 16 + digit), so parsing N hex digits requires O(N\u00b2) CPU work and O(N) memory. Additionally, when input is drip-fed, the parser discards the accumulated length on each partial read and restarts from zero on resumption, raising the cost to O(N\u00b3). An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit this by sending an HTTP\/1.1 request with Transfer-Encoding: chunked and a very long chunk-size hex string to cause denial of service through CPU exhaustion and memory amplification.<\/p>\n<p>This vulnerability is associated with program file src\/cow_http_te.erl and program routines cow_http_te:stream_chunked\/2, cow_http_te:chunked_len\/4.<\/p>\n<p>This issue affects cowlib: from 0.6.0 before 2.16.1.<\/p>\n<p>  Severity: 8.7 | HIGH<\/p>\n<p>  Visit the link for more details, such as CVSS details, affected products, timeline, and more&#8230;\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CVE ID :CVE-2026-7790 Published : May 11, 2026, 7:16 p.m. | 43\u00a0minutes ago Description :Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ninenines cowlib (cow_http_te module) allows Excessive Allocation. The chunked transfer-encoding parser in cow_http_te accepts an unbounded number of hex digits in the chunk-size field. Each digit causes a bignum multiplication (Len * 16 + digit), so &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vulnerability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/afaghhosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}