NATS is vulnerable to pre-auth DoS through WebSockets client service
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 5.3epss 0.5%
exploitation probability
0.5%top 58% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
NATS-Server is a High-Performance server for NATS.io, a cloud and edge native messaging system. Prior to versions 2.11.15 and 2.12.6, a malicious client which can connect to the WebSockets port can cause unbounded memory use in the nats-server before authentication; this requires sending a corresponding amount of data. This is a milder variant of CVE-2026-27571. That earlier issue was a compression bomb, this vulnerability is not. Attacks against this new issue thus require significant client bandwidth. Versions 2.11.15 and 2.12.6 contain a fix. As a workaround, disable websockets if not required for project deployment.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Affected products
nats-io · nats-serverReferences
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:21769https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:22347https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:23345https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-33219https://advisories.nats.io/CVE/secnote-2026-02.txthttps://advisories.nats.io/CVE/secnote-2026-11.txthttps://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2451445https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-qrvq-68c2-7grwhttps://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/security/advisories/GHSA-8r68-gvr4-jh7jhttps://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-33219.json