CVE-2026-54556 PUBLISHED

Http4s: HTTP/2 Denial of Service with Ember Backend

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 15.06.2026 Published: 26.08.2026 Updated: 26.08.2026

Http4s is a Scala interface for HTTP services. Prior to 0.23.35 and 1.0.0-M47, an unauthenticated HTTP/2 peer can cause an out-of-memory denial of service in the Ember backend with HTTP/2 enabled. The Hpack wrapper in ember-core/shared/src/main/scala/org/http4s/ember/core/h2/Hpack.scala concatenates HEADERS and CONTINUATION frame fragments and decodes them into a single List, but maxHeaderSize accounting does not include indexed headers or HPACK per-header overhead. A small compressed header block can therefore expand into a much larger decoded representation that remains in memory for processing. Servers exposed to untrusted HTTP/2 traffic and clients directed to an untrusted HTTP/2 server are affected, and concurrent malicious connections can exhaust the process heap. This issue is fixed in versions 0.23.35 and 1.0.0-M47.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 8.2

Product Status

Vendor http4s
Product http4s
Versions
  • Version < 0.23.35 is affected
  • Version >= 1.0.0-M1, < 1.0.0-M46 is affected
Vendor org.http4s
Product http4s-ember-core_2.12
Versions
  • Version < 0.23.35 is affected
Vendor org.http4s
Product http4s-ember-core_2.13
Versions
  • Version >= 1.0.0-M1, < 1.0.0-M46 is affected
  • Version < 0.23.35 is affected
Vendor org.http4s
Product http4s-ember-core_3
Versions
  • Version >= 1.0.0-M1, < 1.0.0-M46 is affected
  • Version < 0.23.35 is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-409: Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) CWE