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Medium 5.9Published Feb 24, 2026

CVE-2026-27571nats-server websockets are vulnerable to pre-auth memory DoS

Updated under an hour ago ()

Does this affect you?

It affects nats-io nats-server and 1 other product. Add what you run to find out whether that includes you.

No exploitation reported and no EPSS estimate yet.

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.

CVSS
5.9 MEDIUM (v3.1, CNA)CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Weakness (CWE)
CWE-409, CWE-770
Known exploited
Not in CISA's KEV catalog
EPSS (exploitation in the next 30 days)
Not loaded for this CVE
Assigned by
GitHub_M
NVD analysis
Analyzed
Record last updated
Feb 26, 2026
First seen by InfoSec Signals
Oct 9, 2026

Affected products

Affected products
nats-io nats-server
nats_io:nats_server (from the name)
before 2.11.12; from 2.12.0-RC.1, < 2.12.3
CNA record
linuxfoundation nats-server
linuxfoundation:nats-server
before 2.11.12; from 2.12.0 before 2.12.3
NVD

References

References

The CVE record is authoritative. Products marked “from the name” were identified from the CNA's free-text names, not a CPE, and are matched less certainly. This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.

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