Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in the HTTP/2 implementation of mtrudel bandit allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to grow per-connection memory and CPU cost without bound via a large SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE. Bandit resizes its HPACK encoder table to whatever size the client advertises, up to 2^32-1 bytes, and indexes response headers into it. Because responses carry distinct values such as date or content-length, nothing is evicted and the table grows with every response for the life of the connection, while each lookup scans it linearly.
The SETTINGS handling in Bandit.HTTP2.Connection (lib/bandit/http2/connection.ex) passes remote_settings.header_table_size to HPAX.resize/2 with no server-side cap, and encode_headers encodes every response header as :store. Serving N responses on one connection therefore costs O(N²) CPU in the connection process.
This issue affects bandit: from 0.3.6 before 1.14.0.
From 0.7.0, cap the requests one HTTP/2 connection may serve, for example with http_2_options: [max_requests: 1000], so each connection and its encoder table is closed before the cost grows large. Alternatively, disable HTTP/2 with http_2_options: [enabled: false].