Software Engineering Institute

Overview

HTTP allows messages to include named fields in both header and trailer sections. These header and trailer fields are serialised as field blocks in HTTP/2, so that they can be transmitted in multiple fragments to the target implementation. Many HTTP/2 implementations do not properly limit or sanitize the amount of CONTINUATION frames sent within a single stream. An attacker that can send packets to a target server can send a stream of CONTINUATION frames that will not be appended to the header list in memory but will still be processed and decoded by the server or will be appended to the header list, causing an out of memory (OOM) crash.

Description

HTTP/2 utilizes header fields within HTTP request and response messages. Header fields can comprise header lists, which in turn are broken into header blocks. These header blocks are transmitted in multiple fragments to the target implementation. HTTP/2 CONTINUATION frames are used to continue a sequence of field block fragments. They are utilized in order to split header blocks across multiple frames. The other two types of header block fragments are HEADERS or PUSH_PROMISE. CONTINUATION frames can be utilized to continue a header block fragment that could not be transmitted by the HEADERS or PUSH_PROMISE frames. A header block is considered completed when the server receives a set END_HEADERS flag. This is intended to denote that there are no further CONTINUATION, HEADERS, or PUSH_PROMISE frames. A vulnerability has been discovered within multiple implementations that does not limit the amount of CONTINUATION frames that can be sent within a single stream.

The implementation will continue to receive frames as long as the END_HEADERS flag is not set during these communications. An attacker can initialize a connection to a server with typical HTTP/2 frames and then receive initial frames from the server. The attacker can then begin an HTTP request with no set END_HEADERS flags. This can allow an attacker to send a stream of CONTINUATION frames to the target server, which can result in an out-of-memory crash, enabling an attacker to launch a denial of service (DoS) attack against a target server using a vulnerable implementation.

Additionally, an attacker can send HPACK Huffman encoded CONTINUATION frames to a target implementation. This can cause CPU resource exhaustion and result in a DoS as the the CPU must decode every encoded frame that it receives.

Below are several CVE listings to reflect the vulnerability within different implementations.

CVE-2024-27983

An attacker can make the Node.js HTTP/2 server unavailable by sending a small amount of HTTP/2 frames packets with a few HTTP/2 frames inside. It is possible to leave some data in nghttp2 memory after reset when headers with HTTP/2 CONTINUATION frame are sent to the server and then a TCP connection is abruptly closed by the client triggering the Http2Session destructor while header frames are still being processed (and stored in memory) causing a race condition.

CVE-2024-27919

Envoy's oghttp codec does not reset a request when header map limits have been exceeded. This allows an attacker to send an sequence of CONTINUATION frames without the END_HEADERS bit set causing unlimited memory consumption.

CVE-2024-2758

Tempesta FW rate limits are not enabled by default. They are either set too large to capture empty CONTINUATION frames attacks or too small to handle normal HTTP requests appropriately.

CVE-2024-2653

amphp/http will collect HTTP/2 CONTINUATION frames in an unbounded buffer and will not check the header size limit until it has received the END_HEADERS flag, resulting in an OOM crash. amphp/http-client and amphp/http-server are indirectly affected if they're used with an unpatched version of amphp/http. Early versions of amphp/http-client with HTTP/2 support (v4.0.0-rc10 to 4.0.0) are also directly affected.

CVE-2023-45288

The Go packages net/http and net/http2 packages do not limit the number of CONTINUATION frames read for an HTTP/2 request, which permits an attacker to provide an arbitrarily large set of headers for a single request, that will be read, decoded, and subsequently discarded, which may result in excessive CPU consumption.

CVE-2024-28182

An implementation using the nghttp2 library will continue to receive CONTINUATION frames, and will not callback to the application to allow visibility into this information before it resets the stream, resulting in a DoS.

CVE-2024-27316

HTTP/2 CONTINUATION frames without the END_HEADERS flag set can be sent in a continuous stream by an attacker to an Apache Httpd implementation, which will not properly terminate the request early.

CVE-2024-31309

HTTP/2 CONTINUATION DoS attack can cause Apache Traffic Server to consume more resources on the server. Version from 8.0.0 through 8.1.9, from 9.0.0 through 9.2.3 are affected.

CVE-2024-30255

HTTP/2 protocol stack in Envoy versions 1.29.2 or earlier are vulnerable to CPU exhaustion due to flood of CONTINUATION frames. Envoys HTTP/2 codec allows the client to send an unlimited number of CONTINUATION frames even after exceeding Envoys header map limits. This allows an attacker to send a sequence of CONTINUATION frames without the END_HEADERS bit set causing CPU utilization, consuming approximately 1 core per 300Mbit/s of traffic.

Impact

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability can allow an attacker the capability to launch DoS attacks against servers utilizing vulnerable implementations.

Solution

Different HTTP/2 implementations may have separate, unique vulnerabilities specific to that implementation. It is important to note that it may be difficult to analyze incoming malicious traffic exploiting this vulnerability as the HTTP request is not properly completed. Analysis of raw HTTP traffic may be necessary to determine an attack utilizing this vulnerability.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Bartek Nowotarski for reporting the vulnerability. This document was written by Christopher Cullen.

Vendor Information

References

• https://nowotarski.info/
• https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7540
• https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/605641/
• https://vuls.cert.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=56393752
• https://github.com/Netflix/security-bulletins/blob/master/advisories/third-party/2019-002.md