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CVE PROGRAM SOURCE RECORD6.9 Medium

CVE-2026-54894

Atom-table exhaustion denial of service in Guardian via unbounded atom creation from binary keys

Description

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.

Affected products

Version statuses are supplied by the assigning organization. Consult the original record for detailed ranges and platform conditions.

ueberauth guardian

Default version status: unaffected

  • 0.1.0 to < 2.4.1affected
pkg:hex/guardian

ueberauth guardian

Default version status: unaffected

  • 7126fa433afc2563fcac0c9aa35193965f8fd5f8 to < 2952657e42e6341a67e6aaad09d8f0b40ae917cbaffected
pkg:github/ueberauth/guardian

References