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CVE-2026-54894

CVE-2026-54894

What's the vulnerability?

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in ueberauth guardian allows denial of service via unbounded atom creation from attacker-influenced binary input. Guardian.Plug.Keys derives connection and session namespace keys by passing arbitrary binaries to String.to_atom/1. base_key/1 in lib/guardian/plug/keys.ex converts any binary into the atom :"guardian_<input>", and the derived helpers claims_key/1, resource_key/1, and token_key/1 create a second atom on top of that. key_from_other/1 likewise converts a regex-captured binary through String.to_atom/1. The public specs advertise String.t() as a valid argument, so passing a string is documented usage, and higher-level entry points such as Guardian.Plug.current_token(conn, key: key) thread the caller-supplied key straight into these functions. String.to_atom/1 creates a brand-new atom for every previously unseen binary, atoms are never garbage collected, and the BEAM atom table is fixed at roughly 1,048,576 entries by default. An application that routes attacker-influenced data (a tenant identifier, header, or other request input) into a Guardian key therefore mints one permanent atom per distinct value. A modest stream of varied, unauthenticated input permanently consumes the atom table and crashes the BEAM node, taking down every application running on it. This issue affects guardian: from 0.1.0 before 2.4.1.

R4IM analyst take

Business impact & how R4IM helps

This advisory is on our active-exploitation watchlist. Attackers are using it for initial access, privilege escalation or lateral movement in real-world intrusions. R4IM's offensive security and SOC teams already have detections, exploit replicas and remediation playbooks for this issue.

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If the affected product is internet-facing, our AppSec team will harden it against this and related OWASP-class issues.

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Recommended remediation

  1. Inventory all assets running the affected vendor and product, including shadow IT and third-party hosted instances.
  2. Apply the vendor patch or mitigation referenced in the advisories below. Where no patch exists, isolate the asset or restrict network exposure.
  3. Hunt for indicators of prior compromise — exploitation of this class of bug often predates public disclosure.
  4. Deploy detections for the exploit primitives (network signature, EDR rule, WAF rule) and re-test after remediation.

Need help executing these steps? Our team typically completes validation and remediation within a single patch cycle. Request remediation support →

Vendor & research references