CVE-2026-78228: Unbounded handle_error recursion enables denial of service in AshOban triggers

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.9 v4.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-08-30 · updated 2026-09-01
Weakness: CWE-674

Description

Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in ash-project ash_oban allows a user who can drive a trigger's on_error action to fail on the final attempt to exhaust worker CPU and memory, denying service. The generated worker's atomic handle_error/4 runs the trigger's on_error action on a job's final attempt inside a rescue that, when the action itself raises, calls handle_error/4 again with the same job. The job's attempt still equals max_attempts, so it re-enters the same clause and re-runs the failing action, with no exit. Any deterministic on_error failure (a data-layer outage, a misconfigured action, or a record the action rejects) loops forever; because the recursive call is not in tail position, each iteration retains a formatted stacktrace and the process heap grows without bound while the failing statement is re-issued against the data layer until the runtime kills the worker. This issue affects ash_oban: from 0.8.0-rc.1 before 0.8.14.

Affected products

ash-project ash_oban: from 0.8.0-rc.1 before 0.8.14 — fixed in 0.8.14

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: ash-project ash_oban 0.8.14. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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