---
id: CVE-2026-78228
title: >-
  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_er…
summary: >-
  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_er…
severity: none
cwe:
  - CWE-674
published: '2026-08-30'
updated: '2026-08-30'
source: NVD
sourceUrl: 'https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-78228'
references:
  - url: 'https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-78228.html'
    label: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
  - url: >-
      https://github.com/ash-project/ash_oban/commit/851cd0e76ed882bf736fc48d10f96d037e26b5f0
    label: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
  - url: >-
      https://github.com/ash-project/ash_oban/security/advisories/GHSA-94p7-498r-mrhp
    label: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
  - url: 'https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-78228'
    label: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
tags:
  - nvd
ingestedAt: '2026-08-30T17:55:39.868Z'
epss: 0.0018
epssPercentile: 0.06738
---

## Overview

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.

## Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.