The HTTP/2 protocol allows a denial of service (server resource consumption) because request cancellation can reset many streams quickly, as exploited in the wild in August through October 2023.

An attacker may cause an HTTP/2 endpoint to read arbitrary amounts of header data by sending an excessive number of CONTINUATION frames. Maintaining HPACK state requires parsing and processing all HEADERS and CONTINUATION frames on a connection. When a request's headers exceed MaxHeaderBytes, no memory is allocated to store the excess headers, but they are still parsed. This permits an attacker to cause an HTTP/2 endpoint to read arbitrary amounts of header data, all associated with a request which is going to be rejected. These headers can include Huffman-encoded data which is significantly more expensive for the receiver to decode than for an attacker to send. The fix sets a limit on the amount of excess header frames we will process before closing a connection.

nghttp2 is an implementation of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol version 2 in C. The nghttp2 library prior to version 1.61.0 keeps reading the unbounded number of HTTP/2 CONTINUATION frames even after a stream is reset to keep HPACK context in sync. This causes excessive CPU usage to decode HPACK stream. nghttp2 v1.61.0 mitigates this vulnerability by limiting the number of CONTINUATION frames it accepts per stream. There is no workaround for this vulnerability.

A malicious HTTP/2 client which rapidly creates requests and immediately resets them can cause excessive server resource consumption. While the total number of requests is bounded by the http2.Server.MaxConcurrentStreams setting, resetting an in-progress request allows the attacker to create a new request while the existing one is still executing. With the fix applied, HTTP/2 servers now bound the number of simultaneously executing handler goroutines to the stream concurrency limit (MaxConcurrentStreams). New requests arriving when at the limit (which can only happen after the client has reset an existing, in-flight request) will be queued until a handler exits. If the request queue grows too large, the server will terminate the connection. This issue is also fixed in golang.org/x/net/http2 for users manually configuring HTTP/2. The default stream concurrency limit is 250 streams (requests) per HTTP/2 connection. This value may be adjusted using the golang.org/x/net/http2 package; see…

Envoy is a cloud-native high-performance edge/middle/service proxy. Envoy’s HTTP/2 codec may leak a header map and bookkeeping structures upon receiving `RST_STREAM` immediately followed by the `GOAWAY` frames from an upstream server. In nghttp2, cleanup of pending requests due to receipt of the `GOAWAY` frame skips de-allocation of the bookkeeping structure and pending compressed header. The error return [code path] is taken if connection is already marked for not sending more requests due to `GOAWAY` frame. The clean-up code is right after the return statement, causing memory leak. Denial of service through memory exhaustion. This vulnerability was patched in versions(s) 1.26.3, 1.25.8, 1.24.9, 1.23.11.

A maliciously crafted HTTP/2 stream could cause excessive CPU consumption in the HPACK decoder, sufficient to cause a denial of service from a small number of small requests.

All versions of the package is-http2 are vulnerable to Command Injection due to missing input sanitization or other checks, and sandboxes being employed to the isH2 function.

An attacker can cause excessive memory growth in a Go server accepting HTTP/2 requests. HTTP/2 server connections contain a cache of HTTP header keys sent by the client. While the total number of entries in this cache is capped, an attacker sending very large keys can cause the server to allocate approximately 64 MiB per open connection.

In nghttp2 before version 1.41.0, the overly large HTTP/2 SETTINGS frame payload causes denial of service. The proof of concept attack involves a malicious client constructing a SETTINGS frame with a length of 14,400 bytes (2400 individual settings entries) over and over again. The attack causes the CPU to spike at 100%. nghttp2 v1.41.0 fixes this vulnerability. There is a workaround to this vulnerability. Implement nghttp2_on_frame_recv_callback callback, and if received frame is SETTINGS frame and the number of settings entries are large (e.g., > 32), then drop the connection.

nghttp2 before 1.7.1 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory exhaustion).