CVE-2026-115865: Starlet denial of service via large Content-Length

CVE-2026-115865 · Severity: info · Published 2026-10-30

Starlet is a Perl application server that handles HTTP requests. An attacker can send requests with an extremely large Content-Length header to exhaust a worker process's memory and crash it, causing service disruption. By sending multiple such requests, an attacker can repeatedly restart workers and degrade or halt the application.

Technologies: Kazuho Starlet. Vendors: Kazuho.

Quick answers

Is CVE-2026-115865 exploited in the wild?
No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-115865 being exploited in the wild.
How severe is CVE-2026-115865?
Informational severity, published 30 October 2026.
Which products and versions are affected?
Kazuho Starlet before 0.33.
Is there a fix for CVE-2026-115865?
Yes: fixed in Starlet 0.33. Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
How is CVE-2026-115865 attacked?
It is attacked over the network, in a software library.
Am I affected by CVE-2026-115865?
Check whether you run Kazuho Starlet at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.

How to fix

  • Fixed in: Starlet 0.33

Technical details

Starlet's request body reading loop passed the entire declared Content-Length value directly to sysread(), causing Perl to pre-allocate a buffer of that size before any data arrives. A request declaring a Content-Length larger than available memory causes an uncatchable out-of-memory error, killing the worker process. The fix limits each read to CHUNKSIZE pieces, matching the behavior of the chunked transfer encoding branch.

Affected products

  • Kazuho Starlet before 0.33

Timeline

  • 2026-10-30: disclosed

References

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