High severity · published Oct 22, 2026
CVE-2026-93471
Unbounded SAML message decompression in esaml allows memory exhaustion
New
8.7
CVSS
0.4%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) in esaml_binding in dropbox esaml allows an unauthenticated attacker to exhaust server memory and crash the Erlang VM via a crafted compressed SAMLResponse.
esaml_binding:decode_response/2 base64-decodes the attacker-supplied SAMLResponse, inflates it with zlib:unzip/1 with no bound on the output, then converts the result to a charlist with binary_to_list/1 before parsing. This runs on the SAML consume (ACS) and single-logout endpoints, which accept unauthenticated requests by design, and it runs before any signature check. A small deflate stream reaches a compression ratio near 1000 to 1, so a request body of tens of kilobytes inflates to hundreds of megabytes and then to several gigabytes of list heap, so a few requests exhaust memory and take the node down.
This issue affects esaml: from 0.1.0 onward.
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.4% · higher than 38% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
ES
esaml · handnot2
deeb84378d5c82153b470e99d24f77c38afca14a · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-93471
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-93471
cna.erlef.org
https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-93471.html
github.com
https://github.com/arekinath/esaml/commit/deeb84378d5c82153b470e99d24f77c38afca14a
github.com
https://github.com/dropbox/esaml/commit/deeb84378d5c82153b470e99d24f77c38afca14a
github.com
https://github.com/handnot2/esaml/commit/deeb84378d5c82153b470e99d24f77c38afca14a
osv.dev
https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-93471
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