CVE-2016-6581

HIGH

HPACK 1.0.0-2.2.0 - Denial of Service via HPACK Bomb Compression Attack

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

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