Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in elixir-ecto ecto allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust…
CVE-2026-118391
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in elixir-ecto ecto allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust memory in the application and in the database server by sending requests with distinct JSON keys or list lengths where the application interpolates them into jsonextractpath/2, field[^key] or splice/1. Ecto caches prepared queries per repository in an ETS table with no size limit and no eviction. Interpolated JSON path elements become part of the query expression instead of its parameters, and splice/1 expands into one placeholder per element, so every distinct key or list length creates a new cache entry. With ectosql each entry is also a new prepared statement on the database connection that runs it. None of this memory is released until the processes restart. This issue affects ecto: from 3.4.0 before 3.14.3.
Assessment
- CVSS
- 8.9 (v4.0)
- Severity
- High
- Known exploited
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Exploit availability
- Nothing found in Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or public PoC repositories
- Published
- 4 November 2026
- Last updated
- 4 November 2026
- Affected
- elixir-ecto · ecto
- Assigner
- EEF
CVSS vectorCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:H
At the source
References
- https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/security/advisories/GHSA-cxjx-vmm2-qr8r
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-118391.html
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-118391
- https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/commit/d0e97d8a6e274c81c25fbf08087da8d8b9bae0ea
- https://ecto.hexdocs.pm/Ecto.Query.API.html#json_extract_path/2
- https://ecto.hexdocs.pm/Ecto.Query.API.html#splice/1
- https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/commit/eb03f45b999e2bf67ffae92811233eb6e56dba55
- https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/issues/4470
- https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/issues/1031
- https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/commit/cb2f03964dac324a9771f84f5088e395326e6de8
- https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/commit/eef014ad090d27d1a5b69c0e32a50eabd44ab3bb
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