Superlinear base62 decoding exhausts CPU and memory in AshAuthentication API key sign-in
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.2epss 0.5%
exploitation probability
0.5%top 57% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity vulnerability in team-alembic AshAuthentication allows an unauthenticated attacker to exhaust CPU and memory via an oversized base62 segment in a submitted API key.
AshAuthentication.Base.decode62/1 in lib/ash_authentication/base.ex splits its argument into one binary per character and folds it with charval62/2, which recomputes Integer.pow(62, index) at every position instead of accumulating by Horner's method, so cost grows roughly cubically in the input length. bindecode62/1 in the same module is quadratic through Integer.undigits/2 and Integer.digits/2. Neither function caps byte_size/1, and AshAuthentication.Strategy.ApiKey.SignInPreparation passes the underscore-separated segments of the submitted key straight into both, before any key lookup and without prior authentication. The surrounding rescue clauses catch exceptions, not CPU or memory exhaustion.
This issue affects ash_authentication: from 4.8.0 before 4.15.0 and from 5.0.0-rc.0 before 5.0.0-rc.14.
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
Affected products
team-alembic · ash_authenticationReferences
https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-82760.htmlhttps://github.com/team-alembic/ash_authentication/commit/d5a5d4cb5cc17fbd6e2a120a6111b47accad4b8ehttps://github.com/team-alembic/ash_authentication/commit/dfb19c897853686ab481c5e773f7a1a0c74dea04https://github.com/team-alembic/ash_authentication/commit/f3a53f480088419788d5c3934af3131fa9066773https://github.com/team-alembic/ash_authentication/security/advisories/GHSA-q876-xr24-2mcxhttps://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-82760