CVE-2026-27571

Publication date 24 February 2026

Last updated 27 February 2026

Ubuntu priority

Medium

Why this priority?

Cvss 3 Severity Score

5.9 · Medium

Score breakdown

Description

NATS-Server is a High-Performance server for NATS.io, a cloud and edge native messaging system. The WebSockets handling of NATS messages handles compressed messages via the WebSockets negotiated compression. Prior to versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, the implementation bound the memory size of a NATS message but did not independently bound the memory consumption of the memory stream when constructing a NATS message which might then fail validation for size reasons. An attacker can use a compression bomb to cause excessive memory consumption, often resulting in the operating system terminating the server process. The use of compression is negotiated before authentication, so this does not require valid NATS credentials to exploit. The fix, present in versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, was to bounds the decompression to fail once the message was too large, instead of continuing on. The vulnerability only affects deployments which use WebSockets and which expose the network port to untrusted end-points.

Status

Package Ubuntu Release Status
nats-server 25.10 questing
Needs evaluation
24.04 LTS noble
Needs evaluation
22.04 LTS jammy Not in release

Severity score breakdown

Parameter Value
Base score 5.9 · Medium
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity High
Privileges required None
User interaction None
Scope Unchanged
Confidentiality None
Integrity impact None
Availability impact High
Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References

Other references