CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-32686 — Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ericmj decimal allows unauthenticated remote Denial of Service

Medium CVSS 6.9

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ericmj decimal allows unauthenticated remote Denial of Service. The decimal library does not bound the exponent on parsed input. Storing a decimal with a very large exponent (e.g. Decimal.new("1e1000000000")) is accepted without error. Subsequent calls to arithmetic functions (Decimal.add/2, Decimal.sub/2, Decimal.div/2), Decimal.to_string/2 with :normal or :xsd format, Decimal.to_integer/1, Decimal.round/3, or Decimal.compare/3 with a threshold allocate memory proportional to the exponent value, which can exhaust available memory and crash the BEAM VM. Any application that accepts user-supplied decimal input and subsequently performs arithmetic, rounding, conversion to integer, or string formatting on it is exposed. A single malicious request is sufficient to cause an out-of-memory crash. This issue affects decimal: from 0.1.0 before 3.0.0.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.9 (4.0)
Published
2026-05-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

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Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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