CVE-2016-6581
HIGHHPACK 1.0.0-2.2.0 - Denial of Service via HPACK Bomb Compression Attack
Title source: llmDescription
A HTTP/2 implementation built using any version of the Python HPACK library between v1.0.0 and v2.2.0 could be targeted for a denial of service attack, specifically a so-called "HPACK Bomb" attack. This attack occurs when an attacker inserts a header field that is exactly the size of the HPACK dynamic header table into the dynamic header table. The attacker can then send a header block that is simply repeated requests to expand that field in the dynamic table. This can lead to a gigantic compression ratio of 4,096 or better, meaning that 16kB of data can decompress to 64MB of data on the target machine.
References (2)
Core 2
Core References
Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry vdb-entry
x_refsource_bid
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/92315
Mitigation, Vendor Advisory x_refsource_confirm
https://python-hyper.org/hpack/en/latest/security/CVE-2016-6581.html
Scores
CVSS v3
7.5
EPSS
0.0037
EPSS Percentile
59.1%
Attack Vector
NETWORK
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Details
CWE
CWE-399
Status
published
Products (8)
pypi/hpack
1.0.0 - 2.3.0PyPI
python/hpack
1.0
python/hpack
2.0
python/hpack
2.0.1
python/hpack
2.1.1
python/hpack
2.2
python/hyper
0.4
python/hyper
0.6
Published
Jan 10, 2017
Tracked Since
Feb 18, 2026