Tesla has decompression bomb on response body

Summary

Any Tesla client pipeline that includes Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware.Compression eagerly decompresses HTTP response bodies with no size limit. A server under attacker control (or reached via a redirect) can return a tiny gzip-encoded payload that expands into gigabytes of BEAM heap, crashing or freezing the calling process. Stacking multiple content-encoding tokens multiplies the amplification exponentially.

Details

decompress_body/2 in lib/tesla/middleware/compression.ex passes the full response body to :zlib.gunzip/1 or :zlib.unzip/1 with no cap on output size. The list of codec tokens comes from splitting the content-encoding header on commas, and decompress_body/2 recurses once per token. A response advertising content-encoding: gzip, gzip, gzip, gzip triggers four recursive decompression passes. Each gzip layer can expand its input roughly 1000x, so a 284-byte wire payload with four layers inflates to approximately 1 GB at the innermost pass, all materialised as a single binary in the caller's heap.

PoC

1. Serve an HTTP response with content-encoding: gzip, gzip, gzip, gzip where the body is a 1 GB block of zeros compressed through four successive gzip passes.
2. Send that response to a Tesla client whose pipeline includes Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse.
3. decompress_body/2 recurses four times without any size check, materialising ~1 GB in the calling process's heap.
4. Repeated or sufficiently large requests exhaust available memory and crash or freeze the node.

Impact

High severity (CVSS v4.0: 8.2). Any application using tesla 0.6.0 through 1.18.2 with Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware.Compression in its pipeline is vulnerable. The attacker only needs to control a server the client contacts, including via redirects. Fixed in tesla 1.18.3.

Configurations

The application must include Tesla.Middleware.DecompressResponse or Tesla.Middleware.Compression in its Tesla middleware pipeline.

Resources

• Introduction commit: https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/commit/5bd90bb5cf0d15e375edc2a66fa322292940fce2
• Patch commit: https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/commit/340f75b5d191dc747ef7ac6365bd002d1cd55a9d