The idle stream handling in nghttp2 before 1.6.0 allows attackers to have unspecified impact via unknown vectors, aka a heap-use-after-free bug.

If ALTSVC frame is received by libnghttp2 and it is larger than it can accept, the pointer field which points to ALTSVC frame payload is left NULL. Later libnghttp2 attempts to access another field through the pointer, and gets segmentation fault. The largest frame size libnghttp2 accept is by default 16384 bytes.

Receiving ALTSVC frame is disabled by default. Application has to enable it explicitly by calling nghttp2optionsetbuiltinrecvextensiontype(opt, NGHTTP2ALTSVC).

Transmission of ALTSVC is always enabled, and it does not cause this vulnerability. ALTSVC frame is expected to be sent by server, and received by client as defined in RFC 7838.

Affected versions: nghttp2 >= 1.10.0 and nghttp2 <= v1.31.0

A resource consumption vulnerability was found in nghttp2. This flaw allows an attacker to repeatedly construct an overly large HTTP/2 SETTINGS frame with a length of 14,400 bytes that causes excessive CPU usage, leading to a denial of service.

A vulnerability was found in a way nghttp2 processes incoming packets. Nghttpd, nghttp, and libnghttp2asio applications do not limit the memory usage for the incoming HTTP header field. If peer sends specially crafted HTTP/2 HEADERS frames and CONTINUATION frames, they will crash with out of memory error.

Upstream report and fix:

https://github.com/tatsuhiro-t/nghttp2/releases/tag/v1.7.1

[I've seen multiple news articles & blogs in the wake of the coordinated disclosure today, but no postings here yet, so lets start fixing that.]

Google, Cloudflare, AWS, and others released details today of a protocol-level issue in HTTP/2 being exploited in recent months for denial-of-service attacks:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/how-it-works-the-novel-http2-rapid-reset-ddos-attack https://blog.cloudflare.com/technical-breakdown-http2-rapid-reset-ddos-attack/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-aws-protects-customers-from-ddos-events/

This attack works via the multiplexed streams feature of HTTP/2, in which the client repeatedly makes a request for a new stream, and then immediately sends a RSTSTREAM frame to cancel them, resulting in the server doing lots of extra work to set up and tear down the streams, while not hitting any server-side limit on a maximum number of active streams per connection.

CVE-2023-44487 was issued to track this issue across implementations: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-44487

A script to check for affected implemenations has been posted at: https://github.com/bcdannyboy/CVE-2023-44487

Information I've found so far on open source implementations (most via the current listings in the CVE) include:

- Apache httpd: https://chaos.social/@icing/111210915918780532

- caddy: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/5877

- envoy: https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/30055

- golang: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/63417 https://groups.google.com/g/golang-announce/c/iNNxDTCjZvo

- h2o: https://github.com/h2o/h2o/security/advisories/GHSA-2m7v-gc89-fjqf https://github.com/h2o/h2o/pull/3291

- haproxy: https://github.com/haproxy/haproxy/issues/2312

- hyper: https://seanmonstar.com/post/730794151136935936/hyper-http2-rapid-reset-unaffected

- jetty: https://github.com/eclipse/jetty.project/issues/10679 https://github.com/eclipse/jetty.project/releases/tag/jetty-12.0.2 https://github.com/eclipse/jetty.project/releases/tag/jetty-11.0.17 https://github.com/eclipse/jetty.project/releases/tag/jetty-10.0.17 https://github.com/eclipse/jetty.project/releases/tag/jetty-9.4.53.v20231009

- netty: https://github.com/netty/netty/commit/58f75f665aa81a8cbcf6ffa74820042a285c5e61

- nghttp2: https://github.com/nghttp2/nghttp2/pull/1961 https://github.com/nghttp2/nghttp2/releases/tag/v1.57.0

- nginx: https://www.nginx.com/blog/http-2-rapid-reset-attack-impacting-f5-nginx-products/ https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2023-October/S36Q5HBXR7CAIMPLLPRSSSYR4PCMWILK.html

- nodejs: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/50121

- proxygen: https://github.com/facebook/proxygen/pull/466

- swift-nio-http2: https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-nio-http2-security-update-cve-2023-44487-http-2-dos/67764

- tomcat: https://tomcat.apache.org/security-11.html#FixedinApacheTomcat11.0.0-M12 https://tomcat.apache.org/security-10.html#FixedinApacheTomcat10.1.14 https://tomcat.apache.org/security-9.html#FixedinApacheTomcat9.0.81 https://tomcat.apache.org/security-8.html#FixedinApacheTomcat8.5.94

-- -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith () oracle com Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris