CVE-2026-44433
MEDIUMQuicly 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...
Full CISO analysis pending enrichment.
How severe is it?
What is the attack surface?
What should I do?
No patch available
Monitor for updates. Consider compensating controls or temporary mitigations.
Which compliance frameworks are affected?
Compliance analysis pending. Sign in for full compliance mapping when available.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is CVE-2026-44433?
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.
Is CVE-2026-44433 actively exploited?
No confirmed active exploitation of CVE-2026-44433 has been reported, but organizations should still patch proactively.
How to fix CVE-2026-44433?
No patch is currently available. Monitor vendor advisories for updates.
What is the CVSS score for CVE-2026-44433?
CVE-2026-44433 has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 5.3 (MEDIUM).
What are the technical details?
Original Advisory
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.
Weaknesses (CWE)
CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
Primary
CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Primary
CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling CWE-400 — Uncontrolled Resource Consumption: The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
- [Architecture and Design] Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place. The login application should be protected against DoS attacks as much as possible. Limiting the database access, perhaps by caching result sets, can help minimize the resources expended. To further limit the potential for a DoS attack, consider tracking the rate of requests received from users and blocking requests that exceed a defined rate threshold.
- [Architecture and Design] Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question. The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker. recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed.
Source: MITRE CWE corpus.
CVSS Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L