.. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not
.. use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of
.. the License at
..
..   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
..
.. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
.. distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT
.. WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the
.. License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under
.. the License.

.. How to reference a release: :ref:`3.3.3 <release/3.3.3>`

.. _cve/2026-90799:

===========================================================================
CVE-2026-90799: |longtitle|
===========================================================================

.. |longtitle| replace:: Atom-table exhaustion in ``_changes`` sequences and
    ``_search`` bookmarks with specially crafted sequence values

:Date: 12.10.2026

:Affected: 3.5.2 and below

:Severity: High

:Vendor: The Apache Software Foundation

Description
===========

CouchDB makes opaque byte sequences available to clients to be passed back for
resuming operations. These byte sequences are translated into Erlang terms.
As long as only terms are supplied that have been emitted by CouchDB, no
problems occur. But since clients can construct their own byte sequences,
CouchDB can be tricked into allocating Erlang ``atom`` data types until the
internal atom table capacity is exhausted. This causes the Erlang VM BEAM to
hard abort, causing a denial of service.

Mitigation
==========

CouchDB is now safely parsing byte sequences in a way that does not create
new atoms.

Workarounds
===========

N/A

Credit
======

Piotr Karwasz & ZeroVuln Labs reported this issue independently.