RabbitMQ is a messaging and streaming broker. Prior to versions 4.2.7 and 4.3.1, rabbit pid codec:decompose from binary/1 parses a caller-supplied ETF-encoded binary and calls binary to atom(Node, utf8) on the node-name field. It is reached from rabbit volatile queue:pid from name/2, which is invoked for any queue name / routing key beginning amq.rabbitmq.reply-to.. The CandidateNodes membership check happens after the atom is created, and the surrounding try/catch cannot reclaim atoms (they are never GC'd). binary to existing atom is not used. Any authenticated AMQP client can crash the entire Erlang VM (all vhosts, all connections) with ~1M cheap requests. Preconditions include Authenticated AMQP 0-9-1 connection to any vhost No per-connection rate limit low enough to make ~1M operations infeasible. This issue is fixed in versions 4.2.7 and 4.3.1.