HPACK Denial of Service vulnerability (HPACK Bomb)
High severity
GitHub Reviewed
Published
Jul 5, 2019
to the GitHub Advisory Database
•
Updated Aug 17, 2023
Description
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database
Jul 5, 2019
Reviewed
Jun 16, 2020
Last updated
Aug 17, 2023
A HTTP/2 implementation built using any version of the Python HPACK library between v1.0.0 and v2.2.0 could be targeted for a denial of service attack, specifically a so-called "HPACK Bomb" attack. This attack occurs when an attacker inserts a header field that is exactly the size of the HPACK dynamic header table into the dynamic header table. The attacker can then send a header block that is simply repeated requests to expand that field in the dynamic table. This can lead to a gigantic compression ratio of 4,096 or better, meaning that 16kB of data can decompress to 64MB of data on the target machine.
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