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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.9

CVE-2026-75758 json

Unbounded recursion between Inspect.List charlist rendering and List.to_string/1 error path in Elixir

published 2026-08-28 2 mo ago modified 2026-09-01 2 mo ago also EUVD-2026-67707

cvss
5.9
version 4.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 7%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in the Elixir standard library allows an attacker who controls a list passed to inspect/1, List.to_string/1, or List.to_charlist/1 to exhaust a BEAM node's memory.

Inspect.List's charlist branch in lib/elixir/lib/inspect.ex classifies a list as a charlist using List.ascii_printable?/2, which examines only the first :printable_limit (4096 by default) elements, and then calls IO.chardata_to_string/1 on the whole term. A list whose printable prefix exceeds that limit but which contains a later element that is not a code point (an atom, an out-of-range integer, or an improper tail) is therefore mis-classified, and the conversion raises ArgumentError. That conversion runs inside List.to_string/1, whose rescue clause builds its message by interpolating inspect(list), which re-enters the same branch and raises again. The nested inspection is an argument to raise, so the recursion is not in tail position and every level is retained: the process stack grows monotonically while each cycle re-walks the list, until the process is killed by max_heap_size or, by default, the node runs out of memory. List.to_charlist/1 has the same rescue shape.

Below the printable limit the inner inspect/1 sees the invalid element within its counter and renders the list in ordinary bracket form, so a single ArgumentError is raised and no recursion occurs.

This issue affects elixir: from 1.15.0-rc.0 before 1.18.5, from 1.19.0-rc.0 before 1.19.6, and from 1.20.0-rc.0 before 1.20.4.

Patch / fix

  • elixir-lang elixir 1.18.5, 1.19.6, 1.20.4
  • elixir-lang Debian 14 1.20.4+dfsg-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-75758

  • elixir Alpine 3.24 1.19.6-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2026-75758

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • elixir Azure Linux 3.0 1.16.1-3

azure linux advisories AZL-98220

Azure Linux vulnerability data, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, from https://github.com/microsoft/AzureLinuxVulnerabilityData via OSV, under the MIT licence; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. MIT

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-75758 updated cvss 6.2

elixir: Elixir: Denial of Service via uncontrolled recursion in list processing

  • Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.2 elixir Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17.1 elixir
    under investigation
  • Red Hat OpenStack Platform 18.0 elixir
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.18% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 7% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/security/advisories/GHSA-jf5q-v438-665c referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 4.0 5.9 CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CNA 4.0 5.9 CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

Affected products

  • elixir-lang elixir

Classification

Weakness

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.