CVE-2022-0618 Denial of service via HTTP/2 HEADERS frames padding

What is CVE-2022-0618?

CVE-2022-0618 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in SwiftNIO HTTP2, published on 9 Mar 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A program using swift-nio-http2 is vulnerable to a denial of service attack, caused by a network peer sending a specially crafted HTTP/2 frame. This vulnerability is caused by a logical error when parsing a HTTP/2 HEADERS or HTTP/2 PUSH_PROMISE frame where the frame contains padding information without any other data. This logical error caused confusion about the size of the frame, leading to a parsing error. This parsing error immediately crashes the entire process. Sending a HEADERS frame or PUSH_PROMISE frame with HTTP/2 padding information does not require any special permission, so any HTTP/2 connection peer may send such a frame. For clients, this means any server to which they connect may launch this attack. For servers, anyone they allow to connect to them may launch such an attack. The attack is low-effort: it takes very little resources to send an appropriately crafted frame. The impact on availability is high: receiving the frame immediately crashes the server, dropping all in-flight connections and causing the service to need to restart. It is straightforward for an attacker to repeatedly send appropriately crafted frames, so attackers require very few resources to achieve a substantial denial of service. The attack does not have any confidentiality or integrity risks in and of itself: swift-nio-http2 is parsing the frame in memory-safe code, so the crash is safe. However, sudden process crashes can lead to violations of invariants in services, so it is possible that this attack can be used to trigger an error condition that has confidentiality or integrity risks. The risk can be mitigated if untrusted peers can be prevented from communicating with the service. This mitigation is not available to many services. The issue is fixed by rewriting the parsing code to correctly handle the condition. The issue was found by automated fuzzing by oss-fuzz.

Weakness: CWE-130

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-0618?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/apple/swift-nio-http2. It affects 1 product.

Products include Apple Swiftnio Http\/2.

How do I fix CVE-2022-0618?

Upgrade github.com/apple/swift-nio-http2 to 1.20 or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2022-0618 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-0618 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in SwiftNIO HTTP2

• CVE-2022-24666 swift-nio-http2 vulnerable to denial of service via invalid HTTP/2 HEADERS frame length High 7.5
• CVE-2022-24667 swift-nio-http2 vulnerable to denial of service via mishandled HPACK variable length integer encoding High 7.5
• CVE-2022-24668 swift-nio-http2 vulnerable to denial of service via ALTSVC or ORIGIN frames High 7.5
• CVE-2026-64785 swift-nio-http2: Missing CR/LF/NUL validation in header values Medium 5.3
• CVE-2026-28898 SwiftNIO HTTP/2: HTTP/2-to-HTTP/1 Request Smuggling via unvalidated :path pseudo-header in HTTP2ToHTTP1Codec Medium 5.3

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-q36x-r5x4-h4q6.