CVE-2026-54894: medium-severity vulnerability in ueberauth guardian
Atom-table exhaustion denial of service in Guardian via unbounded atom creation from binary keys
Published · Updated
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 6.9epss 0.5%
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in ueberauth guardian allows denial of service via unbounded atom creation from attacker-influenced binary input.
Guardian.Plug.Keys derives connection and session namespace keys by passing arbitrary binaries to String.to_atom/1. base_key/1 in lib/guardian/plug/keys.ex converts any binary into the atom :"guardian_<input>", and the derived helpers claims_key/1, resource_key/1, and token_key/1 create a second atom on top of that. key_from_other/1 likewise converts a regex-captured binary through String.to_atom/1. The public specs advertise String.t() as a valid argument, so passing a string is documented usage, and higher-level entry points such as Guardian.Plug.current_token(conn, key: key) thread the caller-supplied key straight into these functions.
String.to_atom/1 creates a brand-new atom for every previously unseen binary, atoms are never garbage collected, and the BEAM atom table is fixed at roughly 1,048,576 entries by default. An application that routes attacker-influenced data (a tenant identifier, header, or other request input) into a Guardian key therefore mints one permanent atom per distinct value. A modest stream of varied, unauthenticated input permanently consumes the atom table and crashes the BEAM node, taking down every application running on it.
This issue affects guardian: from 0.1.0 before 2.4.1.
CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:H
Affected products
ueberauth · guardianRelated CVEs — ueberauth guardian
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-55734MEDIUMguardian atom exhaustion in Guardian.Permissions.encode_permissions!/1EPSS 0.5%CVE-2026-55733MEDIUMAtom-table exhaustion denial of service in Guardian permissions AtomEncoding via unbounded atom creationEPSS 0.5%CVE-2026-55735HIGHGuardian.revoke/3 acts on unverified token claims, allowing forged-token session revocationEPSS 0.5%