CVE-2026-96618: fallo de gravedad baja en hexpm hex
Hex exhausts memory and disk on oversized or compressed responses from an untrusted mirror
Publicada el · Actualizada el
Aviso por correo cuando entre en el KEV, tenga PoC pública o suba de nota.
8Vexday Risk Score
Sin señal de explotación. Ningún artefacto público de explotación conocido hasta ahora.
ssvc Trackcvss 2.1epss 0.4%
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) vulnerability in hexpm hex allows an untrusted package mirror to exhaust the memory or disk space of the machine running mix deps.get, mix deps.update, mix hex.package fetch or mix hex.docs fetch.
Hex treats a mirror configured with HEX_MIRROR_URL, HEX_MIRROR or mirror_url as untrusted: it doesn't send credentials to it, and it checks registry signatures and package checksums that the mirror can't forge. Several response paths consume memory or disk in proportion to what the mirror sends before any of those checks run.
Hex.HTTP.request/5 reads the whole response body into memory and decompresses it with :zlib.gunzip/1 whenever the response's Content-Encoding contains gzip, with no limit on the compressed or decompressed size. Hex doesn't ask for compressed responses, so the server decides whether this step runs. It applies to registry, package, docs and API responses.
Package tarballs have no download size limit. Hex 2.5.1 holds the whole tarball in memory and writes it to the cache, and the development branch streams it to a temporary file; the 16 MiB tarball limit is checked only when the file is unpacked. The tarball is then unpacked, into deps/<app> in 2.5.1 and into a staging directory on the development branch, before its checksums are compared with the registry.
mix hex.docs fetch, and mix hex.docs offline when docs are missing, write the docs tarball to disk and extract it with :mix_hex_erl_tar.extract/2 without the 16 MiB compressed and 128 MiB decompressed limits that mix_hex_tarball:unpack_docs/3 applies. The signed registry doesn't cover docs tarballs, so nothing checks them.
Registry responses are also decompressed before their signature is checked, in hex_core code that Hex vendors; that part is tracked in https://github.com/hexpm/hex_core/security/advisories/GHSA-7c4r-cgf9-9jmq.
This issue affects hex: from 0.11.2 before 2.5.2.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Productos afectados
hexpm · hexCVEs relacionadas — hexpm hex
En el mismo producto, de las más peligrosas a las menos.
CVE-2026-21619LOWUnsafe Deserialization of Erlang Terms in hex_coreEPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-105274LOWhex_core decompresses registry and Erlang term API responses without size limitsEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-96612HIGHPath traversal in Hex via unvalidated dependency app namesEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-81856LOWTerminal escape sequence injection in Hex via unneutralized server-supplied outputEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-105668HIGHHex release-age cooldown is lifted package-wide when the locked release is retiredEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-96596MEDIUMerl_tar:extract/2 loops forever on a GNU sparse member with a trailing holeEPSS 0.2%
Referencias
https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-96618.htmlhttps://github.com/hexpm/hex/commit/08956100a8283ba500a123e5539ac64d5d7e91d8https://github.com/hexpm/hex/commit/51ea632424fb6ea8765148f96dc25dfeb526b1f8https://github.com/hexpm/hex/commit/bb5189eade682c5fc3f98d9725973a7beb4e1debhttps://github.com/hexpm/hex/security/advisories/GHSA-gf42-pg2f-63jphttps://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-96618