Impact

undici's fetch() crashes the Node.js process when a malicious server returns a response with more than five content codings and closes the connection before sending the body. undici rejects such responses (a content-encoding limit), but it created the internal response stream before that check and returned without attaching an error listener or aborting the request. The early close then surfaces a content-length mismatch on that orphaned internal stream, which Node.js treats as an unhandled error and terminates the process. A remote, unauthenticated server can trigger this with a single response, even when the application correctly catches the fetch() rejection. undici 6.x, 7.x, and 8.x are affected.

Patches

Upgrade to 6.29.1, 7.30.1, or 8.12.2. undici now validates the content-encoding chain before creating the internal body stream and aborts the response when the limit is exceeded, so no error can surface on an orphaned stream.

Workarounds

None.