CVE-2026-44981 CrowdSec LAPI: Denial of Service via Unbounded Gzip Decompression
Unauthenticated attackers can cause denial of service in CrowdSec LAPI by sending large gzip-compressed requests, leading to excessive memory consumption.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-44981?
CVE-2026-44981 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in crowdsecurity crowdsec, published on 16 Jul 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
CrowdSec offers crowdsourced protection against malicious IPs. From 1.7.0 until 1.7.8, the LAPI router used gin-contrib/gzip with DefaultDecompressHandle globally in pkg/apiserver/controllers/controller.go, causing /v1/watchers and /v1/watchers/login to decompress unauthenticated gzip-compressed JSON request bodies without enforcing a maximum decompressed size and allowing excessive heap allocation that can make LAPI unreachable. This issue is fixed in version 1.7.8.
Weakness: CWE-409
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-44981?
3 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec Go | From 1.7.0 | 1.7.8 |
github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec Go | From 1.7.0 | 1.7.8 |
github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec Go | From 1.7.0 | 1.7.8 |
How do I fix CVE-2026-44981?
Upgrade github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec to 1.7.8 or later.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2026-44981 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-44981 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-273h-gvwr-c3qj, GO-2026-5041, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-44981.