CVE-2026-59246

Description

Allocation of resources without limits vulnerability in elixir-mint mint allows a remote HTTP/2 server to exhaust memory on the client host and cause a denial of service. The Mint.HTTP2.handle_continuation/3 function in lib/mint/http2.ex accumulates the header-block fragment carried by each HTTP/2 CONTINUATION frame into a growing conn.headers_being_processed nesting, one level deeper per frame, and only releases it when a frame with the END_HEADERS flag arrives. The only guard on this accumulator is Mint.HTTP2.assert_header_block_within_max_size/2, which sums the byte size of the fragments received so far. Because a CONTINUATION frame is permitted by the protocol to carry a zero-length payload, an unbounded chain of zero-length CONTINUATION frames adds no bytes to the running total, never trips the size cap, and never emits END_HEADERS, yet each frame still nests the accumulator one level deeper. A malicious HTTP/2 server (reachable directly, via an attacker-controlled redirect, via SSRF, or via a man-in-the-middle) can open a stream by sending a HEADERS frame without END_HEADERS and then stream zero-length CONTINUATION frames indefinitely. Client memory grows one cons cell per frame received; sustained bandwidth from the peer drives the BEAM node running the Mint client to memory exhaustion and eventual out-of-memory termination. This issue affects mint: from 0.1.0 before 1.9.2.

Predictions

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

References

• https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-59246.html
• https://github.com/elixir-mint/mint/commit/5779de1666344b32aefc4354184ea07f902f73ce
• https://github.com/elixir-mint/mint/security/advisories/GHSA-8pf6-g464-h6h9
• https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-59246

CWEs

CWE-770