CVE-2026-53426
Atom-table exhaustion denial-of-service via JSON parse_document in MDEx
Description
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in leandrocp MDEx allows Excessive Allocation. MDEx.parse_document/2 accepts a {:json, json} source. In lib/mdex.ex, the private json_to_node/1 function passes the attacker-controlled node_type value to Module.concat/1, which calls String.to_atom/1 and interns a brand-new atom for every distinct value. Atoms are never garbage collected on the BEAM, so a crafted JSON document carrying a unique node_type at each (deeply nested) node mints one permanent atom per node. A single document can intern hundreds of thousands of atoms, and a large enough document exhausts the default atom table (around 1,048,576 atoms) and aborts the entire Erlang VM, taking down every process on the node. Any application that passes untrusted input to the {:json, ...} source of MDEx.parse_document is exposed to an unauthenticated denial-of-service. This issue affects mdex from 0.4.3 before 0.13.2.
INFO
Published Date :
June 29, 2026, 7:11 p.m.
Last Modified :
June 29, 2026, 7:11 p.m.
Remotely Exploit :
No
Source :
EEF
Affected Products
The following products are affected by CVE-2026-53426
vulnerability.
Even if cvefeed.io is aware of the exact versions of the
products
that
are
affected, the information is not represented in the table below.
No affected product recoded yet
CVSS Scores
| Score | Version | Severity | Vector | Exploitability Score | Impact Score | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVSS 4.0 | HIGH | 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db |
Solution
- Update MDEx to version 0.13.2 or later.
- Implement input validation for JSON documents.
- Consider rate limiting for JSON parsing requests.
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CVE-2026-53426 vulnerability anywhere in the article.