decimal vulnerability

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ericmj decimal allows unauthenticated remote Denial of Service. The decimal library does not bound the exponent on parsed input. Storing a decimal with a very large exponent (e.g. Decimal.new("1e1000000000")) is accepted without error. Subsequent calls to arithmetic functions (Decimal.add/2, Decimal.sub/2, Decimal.div/2M), Decimal.to_string/2M with :normalM or :xsdM format, Decimal.to_integer/1M, Decimal.round/3M, or Decimal.compare/3M with a threshold allocate memory proportional to the exponent value, which can exhaust available memory and crash the BEAM VM. Any application that accepts user-supplied decimal input and subsequently performs arithmetic, rounding, conversion to integer, or string formatting on it is exposed. A single malicious request is sufficient to cause an out-of-memory crash. This issue affects decimal: from 0.1.0 before 3.0.0.

Published 7 May 2026Updated 8 Sep 20266 sources
CVSS 6.9

What happened

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in ericmj decimal allows unauthenticated remote Denial of Service. The decimal library does not bound the exponent on parsed input. Storing a decimal with a very large exponent (e.g. Decimal.new("1e1000000000")) is accepted without error. Subsequent calls to arithmetic functions (Decimal.add/2, Decimal.sub/2, Decimal.div/2M), Decimal.to_string/2M with :normalM or :xsdM format, Decimal.to_integer/1M, Decimal.round/3M, or Decimal.compare/3M with a threshold allocate memory proportional to the exponent value, which can exhaust available memory and crash the BEAM VM. Any application that accepts user-supplied decimal input and subsequently performs arithmetic, rounding, conversion to integer, or string formatting on it is exposed. A single malicious request is sufficient to cause an out-of-memory crash. This issue affects decimal: from 0.1.0 before 3.0.0.

Affected versions

decimal: 0.1.0 through before 3.0.0 (semver); bc11f4a2b6fb61fc1360a0ab4e79141bba918841 through before 6a523f3a73b8c9974540e21c7aa88f1258bb35ae (git) Fixed: See vendor advisory.

Why it matters

Review the vendor advisory and exposure of the affected product to determine operational impact.

Detection & mitigation

  • Apply vendor-provided updates or mitigations.
  • Review affected product exposure and access logs.

Public PoC references

No public PoC reference has passed the current publication threshold.