Denial of service via unbounded rounding-scale allocation
Published Oct 10, 2026 · Updated Oct 10, 2026
Resource exhaustion in Decimal before 3.1.2 allows attackers to terminate the BEAM VM via an excessive rounding scale. Decimal.round/3 constructs zero-filled digit lists at the requested scale before applying context precision, making allocation proportional to the untrusted places argument; releases before 1.1.0 instead consume CPU through per-place loops. Exposure requires a consuming application to pass an unbounded user-supplied scale to Decimal.round/2 or Decimal.round/3, and memory exhaustion interrupts every application sharing the terminated VM.
Summary
What happened
Resource exhaustion in Decimal before 3.1.2 allows attackers to terminate the BEAM VM via an excessive rounding scale. Decimal.round/3 constructs zero-filled digit lists at the requested scale before applying context precision, making allocation proportional to the untrusted places argument; releases before 1.1.0 instead consume CPU through per-place loops. Exposure requires a consuming application to pass an unbounded user-supplied scale to Decimal.round/2 or Decimal.round/3, and memory exhaustion interrupts every application sharing the terminated VM.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2026-97853
- Published
- Oct 10, 2026
- Updated
- Oct 10, 2026
- Vendor
- Eric Meadows-Jönsson
- Product
- Decimal
- Classifications
- CWE-789, T1499.004
- Attack vector
- local
- Privileges
- unauthenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Oct 10, 2026CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Oct 10, 2026Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=0.1.0 <3.1.2
- Affected versionversion=05bb73eb40ddef24eda782d905766f56a3660522 <* changes=[{"at":"338f42c8cf6a9749ab70c5af04734c6050ca3dc6","status":"unaffected"},{"at":"3c90af4c3c2dfa4bb4c138760a326dd0eb91822b","status":"unaffected"}]
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Published CVSS scores
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Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Activity data is delayed. The latest report is Sep 28, 2026.
Weakness, pattern, technique
Public exploit references
- Excessive rounding-scale allocation PoCproof of concept · demonstrated
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Technologies
Your stack
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