CVSS7.5
Severityhigh
WeaknessCWE-400
ExploitedNot in CISA KEV
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
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 parsing N hex digits requires O(N²) 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(N³). 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