Last updated 20 July 2026
Last updated 6 June 2026
Last updated 6 June 2026
Last updated 6 June 2026
Last updated 6 June 2026
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.
A vulnerability exists in the ngxhttpscgimodule and ngxhttpuwsgimodule modules that may result in excessive memory allocation or an over-read of data. When scgipass or uwsgipass is configured, an unauthenticated attacker with man-in-the-middle (MITM) ability to control responses from an upstream server may be able to read the memory of the NGINX worker process or restart it. Note: Software versions which have reached End of Technical Support (EoTS) are not evaluated.
When NGINX Plus or NGINX OSS are configured to use the HTTP/3 QUIC module, undisclosed requests can cause NGINX worker processes to terminate.
When NGINX Plus or NGINX OSS are configured to use the HTTP/3 QUIC module, undisclosed requests can cause NGINX worker processes to terminate.
A vulnerability exists in NGINX OSS and NGINX Plus when configured to proxy to upstream Transport Layer Security (TLS) servers. An attacker with a man-in-the-middle (MITM) position on the upstream server side—along with conditions beyond the attacker's control—may be able to inject plain text data into the response from an upstream proxied server.
A vulnerability exists in NGINX OSS and NGINX Plus when configured to proxy to upstream Transport Layer Security (TLS) servers. An attacker with a man-in-the-middle (MITM) position on the upstream server side—along with conditions beyond the attacker's control—may be able to inject plain text data into the response from an upstream proxied server.