Quicly is vulnerable to memory exhaustion
Key facts
- Attack vector
- Network
- Privileges required
- None
- User interaction
- None
- Attack complexity
- Low
- Impact type
- Denial of service
- Confidentiality · integrity · availability
- None · None · High
- Fix status
- Fixed
Attack profile from CVSS 3.1 · NVD. Fix status from CNA. Impact type from CWE-400.
Summary
Quicly is an IETF QUIC protocol implementation intended primarily for use within the H2O HTTP server. Prior to commit 8b178e6, an adversarial peer could send a STREAM frame carrying just one byte at the largest offset being permitted to obtain additional flow control credit, which under certain circumstances could lead to a Denial of Service. Assuming the application prepares a receive buffer for storing all data that arrive out-of-order, up to the largest offset being received, this behavior could lead to the application allocating large amount of memory with the peer sending only a handful of packets, resulting in memory exhaustion. In addition to the receive buffer allocation strategy, the severity of this vulnerability depends on how the application controls the stream concurrency. In case of the H2O HTTP server, under its default setting, this bug increases the maximum amount of memory allocated per connection by about 4 times. This issue has been fixed by commit 8b178e6.
Why it matters now
SSVC decision points
CISA ADP · SSVC 2.0.3
- Exploitation
- None
- Automatable
- Yes
- Technical impact
- Partial
The decision (Track, Attend, Act) also depends on your mission and well-being impact; see CISA's SSVC guide.
Affected products
Remediation
- Fix · CNA quicly (h2o) Fixed in 8b178e6
Timeline
- 2026-10-02 Threatist record created from CVE-2026-44433
References
More h2oai Quicly vulnerabilities
- TI-2026-32377 Quicly is vulnerable to connection state corruption CVSS 3.1HIGH 7.5
- TI-2026-32376 Quicly: Remote Denial of Service via assertion failure when CRYPTO stream handshake data exceeds 32KB CVSS 3.1HIGH 7.5
- TI-2025-38115 Quicly has assertion failures CVSS 3.1HIGH 7.5
- TI-2026-32375 Quicly is vulnerable to stateless reset injection CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.3
Sources
This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. Sources and licences