Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition ('Infinite Loop') The advisory has been revoked - it doesn't affect any version of package elixir  (opens in a new tab)


Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.18% (7th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RHEL10-ELIXIR-20186460
  • published28 Sept 2026
  • disclosed28 Aug 2026

Introduced: 28 Aug 2026

CVE-2026-75758  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-835  (opens in a new tab)

Amendment

The Red Hat security team deemed this advisory irrelevant for RHEL:10.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream elixir package and not the elixir package as distributed by RHEL.

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.