Unbounded integer parsing in the Version module enables CPU and memory exhaustion denial of service
End of life: 6/3/2026, End of support: 12/22/2023, Latest version: 1.15.8
End of life: 6/3/2026, End of support: 12/22/2023, Latest version: 1.15.8
End of support: 6/3/2026, Latest version: 1.19.5
Latest version: 1.20.3
Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in the Elixir standard library allows an attacker who controls a list passed to inspect/1, List.tostring/1, or List.tocharlist/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.asciiprintable?/2, which examines only the first :printablelimit (4096 by default) elements, and then calls IO.chardatatostring/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.tostring/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 maxheapsize or, by default, the node runs out of memory. List.tocharlist/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.