GitHub Advisoryadvisory · crates.io

GHSA-h2v8-394m-p7vv Rustls: Brotli certificate decompression can allocate an attacker-controlled amount of memory up to 1 GiB before authentication.

LOW Published 2026-10-27 Modified 2026-10-27 Official page ↗
Ecosystem
crates.io
Packages
rustls
Severity
Low
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Weaknesses
CWE-770
Reviewed
2026-10-27

Affected packages

• crates.io rustls: < 0.23.46 → fixed in 0.23.46 • crates.io rustls: >= 0.24.0-dev.1, < 0.24.0-dev.2 → fixed in 0.24.0-dev.2

Description

Summary The built-in (but disabled by default) Brotli certificate decoder bounds the output buffer but accepts an input-selected history window. A header of five bytes can specify a 1 GiB window allocation. A peer can abort a process whose allocator cannot satisfy that request. A client must enable Brotli and connect to the peer; a server must enable Brotli and request a client certificate. Neither direction requires a trusted attacker certificate. Details rustls calls `BrotliDecompress` which enables Brotli's large-window extension. rustls applies a limit to certificates, but this applies to the decompressed result, and not to any internal allocations the process requires. Impact Client applications that enable the `brotli` feature will be vulnerable to malicious servers. Server applications that enable the `brotli` feature and enable client authentication will be vulnerable to malicious clients. Potential for denial of service due to memory exhaustion from peers sending malicious Brotli-encoded certificates, for applications that enable Brotli decompression. Acknowledgement Thanks to OpenAI [email protected] for the disclosure.

Related

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness

References