High [CVE-2026-48779] Denial of Service via memory exhaustion from small WebSocket fragments

ws is an open source WebSocket client and server for Node.js. All versions from 1.1.0 up to (but not including) 5.2.5, from 6.0.0 up to 6.2.4, from 7.0.0 up to 7.5.11, and from 8.0.0 up to 8.21.0 are affected by a memory exhaustion DoS vulnerability.

A peer can send a high volume of exceptionally small fragments and data chunks, with modest network traffic, to force the remote peer into allocating and holding structural wrappers that consume far more memory than the default documented message-size limit, leading to process termination due to OOM.

This issue has been fixed in versions 5.2.5, 6.2.4, 7.5.11, and 8.21.0. This action forces the affected component to allocate and hold structural wrappers that consume excessive memory.

Consequently, this leads to process termination and a denial of service (DoS) for the remote peer. This is an Important denial of service vulnerability in the `ws` WebSocket library.

This can result in service disruption for Red Hat products that utilize `ws` for WebSocket communication. Red Hat severity: Important — CVSS 7.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).

Weakness: CWE-1050.

Affected products named by the advisory: Cryostat 4 on RHEL 9; Red Hat AMQ Broker 7.13.6; Red Hat AMQ Broker 7.14.1; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10; and 33 more.