CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-66471 — urllib3 is a user-friendly HTTP client library for Python

High CVSS 8.9

urllib3 is a user-friendly HTTP client library for Python. Starting in version 1.0 and prior to 2.6.0, the Streaming API improperly handles highly compressed data. urllib3's streaming API is designed for the efficient handling of large HTTP responses by reading the content in chunks, rather than loading the entire response body into memory at once. When streaming a compressed response, urllib3 can perform decoding or decompression based on the HTTP Content-Encoding header (e.g., gzip, deflate, br, or zstd). The library must read compressed data from the network and decompress it until the requested chunk size is met. Any resulting decompressed data that exceeds the requested amount is held in an internal buffer for the next read operation. The decompression logic could cause urllib3 to fully decode a small amount of highly compressed data in a single operation. This can result in excessive resource consumption (high CPU usage and massive memory allocation for the decompressed data.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.9 (4.0)
Published
2025-12-05
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
python/pypi
Weaknesses
CWE-409

Affected products

  • python / urllib3

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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