h2o is an HTTP server with support for HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. When an HTTP request using TLS/1.3 early data on top of TCP Fast Open or QUIC 0-RTT packets is received and the IP-address-based access control is used, the access control does not detect and prohibit HTTP requests conveyed by packets with a spoofed source address. This behavior allows attackers on the network to execute HTTP requests from addresses that are otherwise rejected by the address-based access control. The vulnerability has been addressed in commit 15ed15a. Users may disable the use of TCP FastOpen and QUIC to mitigate the issue.

h2o is an HTTP server with support for HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. The configuration directives provided by the headers handler allows users to modify the response headers being sent by h2o. The configuration file of h2o has scopes, and the inner scopes (e.g., path level) are expected to inherit the configuration defined in outer scopes (e.g., global level). However, if a header directive is used in the inner scope, all the definition in outer scopes are ignored. This can lead to headers not being modified as expected. Depending on the headers being added or removed unexpectedly, this behavior could lead to unexpected client behavior. This vulnerability is fixed in commit 123f5e2b65dcdba8f7ef659a00d24bd1249141be.

HTTP/2 Rapid reset attack The HTTP/2 protocol allows clients to indicate to the server that a previous stream should be canceled by sending a RSTSTREAM frame. The protocol does not require the client and server to coordinate the cancellation in any way, the client may do it unilaterally. The client may also assume that the cancellation will take effect immediately when the server receives the RSTSTREAM frame, before any other data from that TCP connection is processed.

Abuse of this feature is called a Rapid Reset attack because it relies on the ability for an endpoint to send a RSTSTREAM frame immediately after sending a request frame, which makes the other endpoint start working and then rapidly resets the request. The request is canceled, but leaves the HTTP/2 connection open.

The HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack built on this capability is simple: The client opens a large number of streams at once as in the standard HTTP/2 attack, but rather than waiting for a response to each request stream from the server or proxy, the client cancels each request immediately.

The ability to reset streams immediately allows each connection to have an indefinite number of requests in flight. By explicitly canceling the requests, the attacker never exceeds the limit on the number of concurrent open streams. The number of in-flight requests is no longer dependent on the round-trip time (RTT), but only on the available network bandwidth.

In a typical HTTP/2 server implementation, the server will still have to do significant amounts of work for canceled requests, such as allocating new stream data structures, parsing the query and doing header decompression, and mapping the URL to a resource. For reverse proxy implementations, the request may be proxied to the backend server before the RSTSTREAM frame is processed. The client on the other hand paid almost no costs for sending the requests. This creates an exploitable cost asymmetry between the server and the client.

Multiple software artifacts implementing HTTP/2 are affected. This advisory was originally ingested from the swift-nio-http2 repo advisory and their original conent follows.

swift-nio-http2 specific advisory swift-nio-http2 is vulnerable to a denial-of-service vulnerability in which a malicious client can create and then reset a large number of HTTP/2 streams in a short period of time. This causes swift-nio-http2 to commit to a large amount of expensive work which it then throws away, including creating entirely new Channels to serve the traffic. This can easily overwhelm an EventLoop and prevent it from making forward progress.

swift-nio-http2 1.28 contains a remediation for this issue that applies reset counter using a sliding window. This constrains the number of stream resets that may occur in a given window of time. Clients violating this limit will have their connections torn down. This allows clients to continue to cancel streams for legitimate reasons, while constraining malicious actors.

h2o is an open source http server. In code prior to the 8c0eca3 commit h2o may attempt to access uninitialized memory. When receiving QUIC frames in certain order, HTTP/3 server-side implementation of h2o can be misguided to treat uninitialized memory as HTTP/3 frames that have been received. When h2o is used as a reverse proxy, an attacker can abuse this vulnerability to send internal state of h2o to backend servers controlled by the attacker or third party. Also, if there is an HTTP endpoint that reflects the traffic sent from the client, an attacker can use that reflector to obtain internal state of h2o. This internal state includes traffic of other connections in unencrypted form and TLS session tickets. This vulnerability exists in h2o server with HTTP/3 support, between commit 93af138 and d1f0f65. None of the released versions of h2o are affected by this vulnerability. There are no known workarounds. Users of unreleased versions of h2o using HTTP/3 are advised to upgrade immediately.