httpd parks a request worker indefinitely on a malformed chunk size sent after the headers

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in Erlang/OTP inets httpd allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to cause denial of service by opening and holding open a large number of connections. The maxclients option is documented to default to 150, and the inets hardening guide presents that limit as the first layer of denial-of-service defence, but a server that does not set it explicitly accepts an unlimited number of simultaneous connections. Establishing the connections is sufficient; no valid request and no authentication are required.

The accept gate in httpdmanager:handlenewconnection/4 reads the option with httpdutil:lookup/2, which returns undefined when the key is absent, rather than the three-argument form carrying the 150 default that the neighbouring getustate/2 uses. Erlang term ordering places every integer before every atom, so the Count =< Max guard holds for any connection count and the server never returns {reject, busy}. Each accepted connection occupies a worker process and a socket for as long as it is held, driving the node towards process, memory and file descriptor exhaustion. Servers that set maxclients explicitly are unaffected, because a configured value is applied as intended.

This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 27.3.4.17, from OTP 28.0 before OTP 28.5.0.6, and from OTP 29.0 before OTP 29.0.6, corresponding to inets from 5.10 before 9.3.2.7, from 9.4 before 9.6.2.3, and from 9.7 before 9.7.2.