Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in ueberauth guardian allows denial of service via unbounded atom creation from attacker-controlled binary input. Guardian.Permissions.AtomEncoding encodes permission scopes by passing arbitrary binaries to String.to_atom/1. When encode/3 in lib/guardian/permissions/atom_encoding.ex is called with a list, each binary entry is handled by the encode_value/3 binary clause, which calls String.to_atom(value) with no allow-list check. The perm_set argument (the application's small, finite set of legitimate permission names) is discarded, so any external string flows straight into atom creation. This encoder is selected with use Guardian.Permissions, encoding: Guardian.Permissions.AtomEncoding and reached through the imported encode/3 entry point. String.to_atom/1 creates a brand-new atom for every previously unseen binary, atoms are never garbage collected, and the BEAM atom table is fixed at roughly 1,048,576 entries by default. An application that funnels attacker-influenced permission scopes (from a request body, a JWT claim, or other external input) into encode/3 therefore mints one permanent atom per distinct value. A modest stream of varied, unauthenticated input permanently consumes the atom table and crashes the BEAM node with system_limit, taking down every application running on it. The default encoder is Guardian.Permissions.BitwiseEncoding, which is not affected. This issue affects guardian: from 2.0.0 before 2.4.1.
History

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:00:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in ueberauth guardian allows denial of service via unbounded atom creation from attacker-controlled binary input. Guardian.Permissions.AtomEncoding encodes permission scopes by passing arbitrary binaries to String.to_atom/1. When encode/3 in lib/guardian/permissions/atom_encoding.ex is called with a list, each binary entry is handled by the encode_value/3 binary clause, which calls String.to_atom(value) with no allow-list check. The perm_set argument (the application's small, finite set of legitimate permission names) is discarded, so any external string flows straight into atom creation. This encoder is selected with use Guardian.Permissions, encoding: Guardian.Permissions.AtomEncoding and reached through the imported encode/3 entry point. String.to_atom/1 creates a brand-new atom for every previously unseen binary, atoms are never garbage collected, and the BEAM atom table is fixed at roughly 1,048,576 entries by default. An application that funnels attacker-influenced permission scopes (from a request body, a JWT claim, or other external input) into encode/3 therefore mints one permanent atom per distinct value. A modest stream of varied, unauthenticated input permanently consumes the atom table and crashes the BEAM node with system_limit, taking down every application running on it. The default encoder is Guardian.Permissions.BitwiseEncoding, which is not affected. This issue affects guardian: from 2.0.0 before 2.4.1.
Title Atom-table exhaustion denial of service in Guardian permissions AtomEncoding via unbounded atom creation
First Time appeared Ueberauth
Ueberauth guardian
Weaknesses CWE-770
CPEs cpe:2.3:a:ueberauth:guardian:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
Vendors & Products Ueberauth
Ueberauth guardian
References
Metrics cvssV4_0

{'score': 6.9, 'vector': 'CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:H'}


cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: EEF

Published:

Updated: 2026-08-01T18:46:12.113Z

Reserved: 2026-06-17T10:44:34.365Z

Link: CVE-2026-55733

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

No data.

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

No data.