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Medium

Quicly is vulnerable to memory exhaustion

Type: advisorySources: OSV

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.

Products
Not specified
Affected versions
Not specified
Fixed versions
Not specified
CVEs
CVE-2026-44433
Confirmed fixed CVEs
Not specified
Updated in this feed
2 Nov 2026, 21:43 UTC · Revision 1

Source evidence

Quicly is vulnerable to memory exhaustion

core-osv · Original source

Published 16 Jul 2026, 22:23 UTC

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.

osv:CVE-2026-44433
Complete source record
{
  "id": "99b6ae14851368b3a2f2172bbd27f2292913f3f2f5a9e9e53114497b91a24fb7",
  "url": "https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2026-44433",
  "method": "structured",
  "payload": {
    "kind": "advisory",
    "title": "Quicly is vulnerable to memory exhaustion",
    "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.",
    "evidence": "osv:CVE-2026-44433",
    "products": [],
    "severity": "medium",
    "structured": {
      "id": "CVE-2026-44433",
      "aliases": [
        "CVE-2026-44433",
        "GHSA-f7qr-4p37-9gx9"
      ],
      "metrics": [
        {
          "type": "CVSS_V3",
          "score": "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L"
        }
      ],
      "affected": [
        {
          "ranges": [
            {
              "repo": "https://github.com/h2o/quicly",
              "type": "GIT",
              "events": [
                {
                  "introduced": "0"
                },
                {
                  "fixed": "8b178e6"
                },
                {
                  "fixed": "8b178e692c51a3b1031612ef89f03a53aac63c15"
                }
              ],
              "database_specific": {
                "extracted_events": [
                  {
                    "range": [
                      {
                        "introduced": "0"
                      },
                      {
                        "fixed": "8b178e6"
                      }
                    ],
                    "source": "DESCRIPTION"
                  },
                  {
                    "range": [
                      {
                        "fixed": "8b178e692c51a3b1031612ef89f03a53aac63c15"
                      }
                    ],
                    "source": "REFERENCES_COMMIT"
                  }
                ]
              }
            }
          ],
          "database_specific": {
            "source": "https://storage.googleapis.com/cve-osv-conversion/osv-output/CVE-2026-44433.json"
          }
        }
      ],
      "modified": "2026-10-28T02:30:23.678369324Z",
      "provider": "osv",
      "references": [
        "https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2026/44xxx/CVE-2026-44433.json",
        "https://github.com/h2o/quicly/security/advisories/GHSA-f7qr-4p37-9gx9",
        "https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-44433",
        "https://github.com/h2o/quicly/commit/8b178e692c51a3b1031612ef89f03a53aac63c15"
      ],
      "provider_metadata": {
        "cwe_ids": [
          "CWE-400",
          "CWE-770"
        ],
        "cna_assigner": "GitHub_M",
        "unresolved_ranges": [
          {
            "extracted_events": [
              {
                "range": [
                  {
                    "fixed": "8b178e6"
                  }
                ],
                "source": "AFFECTED_FIELD",
                "strategy": "StringRangeExpression"
              }
            ]
          }
        ],
        "osv_generated_from": "https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2026/44xxx/CVE-2026-44433.json"
      }
    },
    "related_cves": [
      {
        "value": "CVE-2026-44433",
        "evidence": "/id"
      }
    ],
    "security_relevant": true,
    "severity_evidence": "/severity/0/score"
  },
  "source_id": "core-osv",
  "document_id": 490233,
  "published_at": "2026-07-16T22:23:17.247+00:00"
}