CVE-2026-97200

## Summary Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in `hackney_conn` in benoitc hackney allows a malicious HTTP server to exhaust client memory via an oversized or highly compressed response body. `hackney:request/5` and `hackney:body/1` return the whole response body, and nothing bounds how much the connection process buffers. Any server the client requests can trigger it. `hackney_conn:read_full_body/2` and the HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 accumulators append every chunk until the body ends. With `{auto_decompress, true}` the buffered body is then inflated in one step with `zlib:gunzip/1` or `zlib:inflate/2`, which return the whole output at once. This issue affects hackney: from 2.0.0-beta.1 before 4.9.0. ## Details **1. Unbounded accumulation.** `hackney:request/5` with a body, and `hackney:body/1` after `start_response/1`, read the response in `src/hackney_conn.erl` through `read_full_body/2`, which appends each chunk to a binary accumulator until the body ends. The HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 synchronous paths accumulate stream data the same way. No option caps the size. **2. One-step decompression.** With `{auto_decompress, true}` hackney sends `Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate`. Once the body is complete, `maybe_decompress_body/2` dispatches on `Content-Encoding` to `decompress_gzip/1` (`zlib:gunzip/1`) or `decompress_deflate/1` (`zlib:inflate/2`). Both return the whole output at once, so the inflated size is bounded only by the compression ratio. The report measured a 1 MB gzip body inflating to 1 GB on hackney 4.8.4. ## Proof of concept 1. Build a gzip stream whose inflated size is 1 GB from a reused 64 KB chunk of zero bytes (deflate with window bits 31, best compression). The stream is about 1 MB on the wire. 2. Start a TCP listener on loopback that accepts one connection, reads the request, and answers `HTTP/1.1 200 OK` with `Content-Encoding: gzip`, a `Content-Length` matching the stream, `Connection: close`, and the stream as body. 3. From a node running a vulnerable hackney, call `hackney:request(get, Url, [], <<>>, [{auto_decompress, true}, with_body])` against that listener. 4. Observe the returned body of 1,048,576,000 bytes and the VM memory growing by about 1.8 GB for a 1,019,197 byte response. A larger stream, or an endless body without `auto_decompress`, drives the node out of memory. ## Impact A server the client requests can make the client allocate memory proportional to the body it sends, or to its decompressed size, until the node runs out of memory. ## Workarounds Leave `auto_decompress` disabled (the default). Without it `hackney_conn:maybe_decompress_body/2` never inflates the body, which closes the amplification half. The uncapped raw body read has no workaround.