Quadratic CPU blow-up reassembling fragmented WebSocket messages in Bandit
Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity vulnerability in mtrudel bandit allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via CPU exhaustion during WebSocket fragment reassembly.
The size guard 'Elixir.Bandit.WebSocket.Connection':oversize\_message?/2 called from handle\_frame/3 in lib/bandit/websocket/connection.ex appends each non-final continuation frame to a left-nested iolist and then re-measures the entire accumulated buffer with IO.iodata\_length/1 on every frame. Because the buffer grows by one element per frame and is fully re-traversed each time, reassembly work is quadratic (O(n^2)) in the number of continuation frames.
The max\_fragmented\_message\_size limit (default 8 MB) bounds total bytes but not frame count, and each frame can carry as little as one payload byte, so an attacker can send millions of tiny continuation frames using modest bandwidth to pin a CPU core for minutes to hours. Many concurrent connections can starve the whole server of CPU, denying service to legitimate users. The WebSocket read timeout does not help, because it is an idle timeout evaluated between reads and cannot preempt the synchronous reassembly work spent inside a single callback.
This issue affects bandit: from 1.11.0 before 1.12.1.
This vulnerability only affects applications that serve WebSocket endpoints through Bandit (including Phoenix applications that use Bandit as the HTTP adapter). Applications that do not upgrade any connections to WebSocket are not affected.
This issue can be reached over the network, attack complexity is low, an attacker needs no privileges on the target. No user interaction is required. Rated impact: confidentiality none, integrity none, availability high.
The score comes from this vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVE-2026-65623 is classified as CWE-407: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity. Crafted input drives an algorithm into its worst case, so a small request costs disproportionate work.
CVE-2026-65623 is recorded against 2 packages.
Published on 24 July 2026 and last revised on 30 July 2026. No public exploit is currently recorded for this entry. A vendor advisory or fix has been published. Record sourced from NVD.
github.com (Advisory)
cna.erlef.org (Web)
github.com (Fix)
hex.pm (Package)
bandit has other advisories on record. If you are patching this one, these are worth checking on the same host:
These advisories are the same class of weakness (CWE-407: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity) in other software:
Details
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected Packages
| Software | From version | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| bandit | — | — |
| unknown | — | — |
References
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