CVE-2026-75758 Affecting elixir package, versions <1.19.6-r0


Severity

Recommended
low

Based on default assessment until relevant scores are available.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.18% (7th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-ALPINE324-ELIXIR-19432398
  • published31 Aug 2026
  • disclosed28 Aug 2026

Introduced: 28 Aug 2026

CVE-2026-75758  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade Alpine:3.24 elixir to version 1.19.6-r0 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream elixir package and not the elixir package as distributed by Alpine. See How to fix? for Alpine:3.24 relevant fixed versions and status.

Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in the Elixir standard library allows an attacker who controls a list passed to inspect/1, List.to_string/1, or List.to_charlist/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.ascii_printable?/2, which examines only the first :printable_limit (4096 by default) elements, and then calls IO.chardata_to_string/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.to_string/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 max_heap_size or, by default, the node runs out of memory. List.to_charlist/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.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1