CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-11080 — In nghttp2 before version 1.41.0, the overly large HTTP/2 SETTINGS frame payload causes denial of service

High CVSS 7.5

In nghttp2 before version 1.41.0, the overly large HTTP/2 SETTINGS frame payload causes denial of service. The proof of concept attack involves a malicious client constructing a SETTINGS frame with a length of 14,400 bytes (2400 individual settings entries) over and over again. The attack causes the CPU to spike at 100%. nghttp2 v1.41.0 fixes this vulnerability. There is a workaround to this vulnerability. Implement nghttp2_on_frame_recv_callback callback, and if received frame is SETTINGS frame and the number of settings entries are large (e.g., > 32), then drop the connection.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-06-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-707, CWE-400

Affected products

  • nghttp2 / nghttp2
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0
  • opensuse / leap / 15.1
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 31
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 33

Showing 6 representative product identities from 23 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.