GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI

GHSA-8xx6-hgc6-gc2m HTTPX2: Streaming response decompression does not bound peak memory (decompression amplification)

HIGH Published 2026-09-08 Modified 2026-09-08 Official page ↗
Aliases
CVE-2026-84382
Ecosystem
PyPI
Packages
httpx2
Severity
High
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Weaknesses
CWE-409
Reviewed
2026-09-08

Affected packages

• PyPI httpx2: < 2.12.0 → fixed in 2.12.0

Description

Summary When decoding a compressed response body (`gzip`, `deflate`, `br`, or `zstd`), HTTPX2 fully decompressed each network read before yielding content to the application. A small compressed input could therefore cause a large intermediate memory allocation, even when the application streamed the response to keep memory usage bounded. Details HTTPX2's default transport reads the socket in pieces of up to 64 KiB. Before `2.12.0`, each piece was inflated completely into one intermediate allocation before any decompressed bytes were yielded. At DEFLATE's maximum compression ratio of roughly 1032:1, a 64 KiB compressed chunk can expand to about 64 MiB in one allocation. Brotli and Zstandard responses can cause similarly large amplification. Streaming the response did not prevent these transient allocations. Impact Applications that fetch resources from untrusted or attacker-influenced servers - such as webhook receivers, link unfurlers, crawlers, SSRF-reachable fetchers, and redirect followers - can experience memory pressure or out-of-memory termination when processing a malicious compressed response. No authentication or user interaction is required beyond issuing a request to the server. Mitigation Upgrade to HTTPX2 `2.12.0` or later. Patched versions decompress responses incrementally with bounded intermediate buffers, including responses with multiple content encodings.

Related

Alias · CVE (1)

  • CVE-2026-84382 HTTPX2 is a next generation HTTP client for Python. vulnerability

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-409 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) weakness

References