CVE-2026-43970
MEDIUMDescription
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows unauthenticated remote denial of service via memory exhaustion. cow_spdy:inflate/2 in cowlib passes peer-supplied compressed bytes directly to zlib:inflate/2 with no output size bound. The SPDY header compression dictionary (?ZDICT) is public, and zlib compresses long runs of repeated bytes at roughly 1024:1, so a few kilobytes of SPDY frame payload can decompress to gigabytes on the BEAM heap, OOM-killing the node. A single unauthenticated SPDY frame is sufficient to trigger the condition. The parsers for syn_stream, syn_reply, and headers frame types are all affected via cow_spdy:parse_headers/2. This issue affects cowlib from 0.1.0 before 2.16.1.
How to fix
TridentStack Control can deploy fixes like this automatically across your Windows, macOS, and Linux fleet. See how it works
Remediation is compiled from vendor and distribution security advisories. Always confirm against the linked source for your exact version and platform.
CVSS v4 Vector
Exploitability
Impact
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/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
Exploit Intelligence
Moderate risk: more likely to be exploited than 42% of all known CVEs.
References
Related Vulnerabilities
Other CWE-409 vulnerabilities, ordered by exploit likelihood. View all
| CVE | Severity | CVSS | EPSS | Exploited | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2026-49975 | High | 7.5 | 34% | - | Fix |
| CVE-2026-21441 | High | 7.5 | 3.0% | - | Fix |
| CVE-2024-43499 | High | 7.5 | 2.6% | - | Fix |
| CVE-2024-28180 | Medium | 4.3 | 2.0% | - | Fix |
| CVE-2017-16129 | Medium | 5.9 | 1.8% | - | Fix |
| CVE-2022-29225 | High | 7.5 | 1.6% | - | Fix |
Common questions
How do I fix CVE-2026-43970?
Upgrade erlang-cowlib on debian unstable to 2.17.1-1 or later.
Is CVE-2026-43970 being actively exploited?
Not that we know of. CVE-2026-43970 is not in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Its EPSS score of 0.51% is the estimated probability that it will be exploited in the next 30 days. That is higher than 42% of all scored CVEs.
How severe is CVE-2026-43970?
CVE-2026-43970 has a CVSS v4 base score of 8.2, rated moderate. CVSS rates the technical impact if the vulnerability is exploited, not how likely that is, so weigh it alongside the exploit-prediction score when you decide what to patch first.
What does CVE-2026-43970 affect?
Published advisories record a fix for erlang-cowlib (Debian). Only products with a sourced advisory are listed, so treat this as what we can cite rather than a complete inventory.
Embed a live status badge for CVE-2026-43970
Markdown
[](https://tridentstack.com/cve/CVE-2026-43970)HTML
<a href="https://tridentstack.com/cve/CVE-2026-43970"><img src="https://tridentstack.com/cve/badge/CVE-2026-43970.svg" alt="CVE-2026-43970"></a>Check your Linux endpoints for this class of vulnerability
TridentStack Control continuously scans Linux endpoints for known vulnerabilities and deploys the fixes from the same console. 200 endpoints free forever, no credit card.
This product uses NVD data but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. EPSS scores courtesy of FIRST.org (https://www.first.org/epss). Source: CISA KEV Catalog. Data as of 2026-06-17.