Resource exhaustion in quiche HTTP/3 and QPACK layers

Summary

CVECVE-2026-12523
StatePUBLISHED
Assignercloudflare
Source PriorityCVE Program / NVD first with legacy fallback
Published2026-07-14 16:16:45 UTC
Updated2026-07-15 18:16:44 UTC
DescriptionSummary Cloudflare quiche's HTTP/3 layer was discovered to be vulnerable to resource exhaustion (i.e., memory) by means of specially crafted HTTP/3 frames. Impact HTTP/3 defines multiple frame types to support HTTP message exchanges and connection management. Each frame has a length and a payload whose length depends on the frame type. quiche was found to be vulnerable when parsing some frame types to pre-allocating memory based on the declared length. An attacker would not need to send the number of declared bytes to trigger this issue. In addition, quiche was found to not apply QPACK decompression limits correctly. This could allow an attacker to send specially crafted HEADERS frames that would cause more memory commitment than otherwise advertised by MAX_FIELD_SECTION_SIZE (configured by set_max_field_section_size()). Mitigation: * Users are requested to upgrade to quiche 0.29.3 which is the earliest version containing the fix for this issue. Credits: Disclosed responsibly by Sébastien Féry

Risk And Classification

Primary CVSS: v3.1 7.5 HIGH from [email protected]

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS: 0.002920000 probability, percentile 0.210970000 (date 2026-07-15)

Problem Types: CWE-400 | CWE-400 CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption


VersionSourceTypeScoreSeverityVector
3.1[email protected]Secondary7.5HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
3.1CNACVSS7.5HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVSS v3.1 Breakdown

Attack Vector
Network
Attack Complexity
Low
Privileges Required
None
User Interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Vendor Declared Affected Products

SourceVendorProductVersionPlatforms
CNA Cloudflare Quiche affected 0.1.0 0.29.3 semver Not specified

References

ReferenceSourceLinkTags
github.com/cloudflare/quiche/security/advisories/GHSA-4fgf-9xrr-88gf [email protected] github.com
CVE Program record CVE.ORG www.cve.org canonical
NVD vulnerability detail NVD nvd.nist.gov canonical, analysis

Vendor Comments And Credit

Discovery Credit

CNA: Sébastien Féry (en)

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