CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-50247 — h2o is an HTTP server with support for HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3

High CVSS 7.5

h2o is an HTTP server with support for HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. The QUIC stack (quicly), as used by H2O up to commit 43f86e5 (in version 2.3.0-beta and prior), is susceptible to a state exhaustion attack. When H2O is serving HTTP/3, a remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability to progressively increase the memory retained by the QUIC stack. This can eventually cause H2O to abort due to memory exhaustion. The vulnerability has been resolved in commit d67e81d03be12a9d53dc8271af6530f40164cd35. HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 are not affected by this vulnerability as they do not use QUIC. Administrators looking to mitigate this issue without upgrading can disable HTTP/3 support.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-12-12
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • dena / h2o
  • dena / h2o / 2.3.0

Showing 2 representative product identities from 3 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

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