nats-server websockets are vulnerable to pre-auth memory DoS (nats-io nats-server)

CVE-2026-27571
MEDIUM 5.9

At a glance

Source
NVD
EPSS
EPSS 0.54 % · percentile 46 ()
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
GitHub_M
NVD status
Analyzed

Description

NATS-Server is a High-Performance server for NATS.io, a cloud and edge native messaging system. The WebSockets handling of NATS messages handles compressed messages via the WebSockets negotiated compression. Prior to versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, the implementation bound the memory size of a NATS message but did not independently bound the memory consumption of the memory stream when constructing a NATS message which might then fail validation for size reasons. An attacker can use a compression bomb to cause excessive memory consumption, often resulting in the operating system terminating the server process. The use of compression is negotiated before authentication, so this does not require valid NATS credentials to exploit. The fix, present in versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, was to bounds the decompression to fail once the message was too large, instead of continuing on. The vulnerability only affects deployments which use WebSockets and which expose the network port to untrusted end-points.

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-409 — Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)
  • CWE-770 — Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

References

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HGitHub_M
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HNVD · security-advisories@github.com (Secondary)
CVSS 3.1HIGH 7.5CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HNVD · nvd@nist.gov (Primary)

Advisories

European references

CERT-FR advisories

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
nats-io · nats-serveraffected < 2.11.12 ; affected >= 2.12.0-RC.1, < 2.12.3

Sources

SourceLicence
CVE List (CVEProject cvelistV5)CVE Program Terms of Use
EPSS (FIRST.org)FIRST — attribution requested
ENISA EUVDENISA — reproduction authorised, source acknowledged
CERT-FR (ANSSI)Licence Ouverte / Etalab 2.0
NVD (NIST) via fkie-cad/nvd-json-data-feedsPublic domain — this product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD