Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) in esaml_binding in dropbox esaml allows an unauthenticated attacker to exhaust server memory and crash the Erlang VM via a crafted compressed SAMLResponse. esaml_binding:decode_response/2 base64-decodes the attacker-supplied SAMLResponse, inflates it with zlib:unzip/1 with no bound on the output, then converts the result to a charlist with binary_to_list/1 before parsing. This runs on the SAML consume (ACS) and single-logout endpoints, which accept unauthenticated requests by design, and it runs before any signature check. A small deflate stream reaches a compression ratio near 1000 to 1, so a request body of tens of kilobytes inflates to hundreds of megabytes and then to several gigabytes of list heap, so a few requests exhaust memory and take the node down. This issue affects esaml: from 0.1.0 onward.
Fix
Nothing published yet: no patch, vendor advisory or mitigation reference on NVD, no vendor advisory in the News for this CVE, not in CISA's KEV, no fixed package version. BaselineWatch does not guess at one.
Change history 6
- StatusPublished → DeferredNVD modified 2026-10-22 16:58
- StatusReceived → PublishedNVD modified 2026-10-22 06:59
- Cpes-3 CPE criteria (now 0)NVD modified 2026-10-22 09:17
- StatusPublished → ReceivedNVD modified 2026-10-22 09:17
- CVSS8.7 (v4.0, 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) → 8.7 (v4.0, 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/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X)NVD modified 2026-10-22 09:17
- First seenCVSS 8.7 · handnot2, arekinath, dropboxNVD modified 2026-10-22 06:59
Affected (CPE criteria) 0
NVD has not attached CPE configurations yet.
References 5
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-93471.html
- https://github.com/arekinath/esaml/commit/deeb84378d5c82153b470e99d24f77c38afca14a
- https://github.com/dropbox/esaml/commit/deeb84378d5c82153b470e99d24f77c38afca14a
- https://github.com/handnot2/esaml/commit/deeb84378d5c82153b470e99d24f77c38afca14a
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-93471