Mooncake transfer engine through 0.3.13.post1 Memory Exhaustion via Unbounded Notify Queue

Advisories

Mooncake transfer engine through 0.3.13.post1 Memory Exhaustion via Unbounded Notify Queue

severity: high
date: 10/1/2026
Affecting: Mooncake <= 0.3.13.post1
CVE: CVE-2026-103761
CWE: CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
CVSS: 8.7
CVSS V4 Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
References: GitHub Issue #4445
https://github.com/kvcache-ai/Mooncake/blob/719735896c86b56fabec6cf3e825fb2ea640597a/mooncake-transfer-engine/src/transfer_metadata.cpp#L285-L296
https://github.com/kvcache-ai/Mooncake
Credit: Mingkai Yu, Jiajia Liu
Description: Mooncake transfer engine through 0.3.13.post1 contains a memory exhaustion vulnerability in TransferMetadata::receivePeerNotify that allows unauthenticated attackers to grow process memory without limit. Attackers can repeatedly send notify frames up to 1 MB to the handshake RPC port, filling the uncapped notifys vector until the out-of-memory killer terminates the engine.

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