CVE-2016-6581: HPACK Denial of Service vulnerability (HPACK Bomb)
(updated )
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.
References
- github.com/advisories/GHSA-ffq8-576r-v26g
- github.com/pypa/advisory-database/tree/main/vulns/hpack/PYSEC-2017-87.yaml
- github.com/python-hyper/hpack
- nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-6581
- python-hyper.org/hpack/en/latest/security/CVE-2016-6581.html
- web.archive.org/web/20200227233559/http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/92315
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