CVE-2022-41717 Excessive memory growth in net/http and golang.org/x/net/http2

Medium 5.3 Published 8 Dec 2022 Updated 13 Feb 2025

An attacker can cause excessive memory growth in Go servers handling HTTP/2 requests, leading to denial of service.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Over the internet
Victim action needed: Not needed
Fix: Available

What is CVE-2022-41717?

CVE-2022-41717 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Fedoraproject Fedora, published on 8 Dec 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

An attacker can cause excessive memory growth in a Go server accepting HTTP/2 requests. HTTP/2 server connections contain a cache of HTTP header keys sent by the client. While the total number of entries in this cache is capped, an attacker sending very large keys can cause the server to allocate approximately 64 MiB per open connection.

Weakness: CWE-770

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-41717?

7 open source packages ship an affected version, including golang.org/x/net, golang and golang.org/x/net/http2. It affects 3 products.

Package	Affected	Fixed in
`golang.org/x/net` Go	All versions	`0.4.0`
`golang.org/x/net` Go	All versions	`0.4.0`
`golang.org/x/net` Go	All versions	`0.4.0`
`golang` Bitnami	All versions	`1.18.9, 1.19.4`
`golang.org/x/net/http2` Go	All versions	`0.4.0`
`golang.org/x/net/http2` Go	All versions	`0.4.0`

1 more packages

stdlib Go All versions 1.18.9, 1.19.4

Linux distribution packages (7)

`conmon` AlmaLinux:9	All versions	`2:2.1.7-1.el9_2`
`conmon` Red Hat:enterprise_linux:9::appstream	All versions	`2:2.1.7-1.el9_2`
`conmon-debuginfo` Red Hat:enterprise_linux:9::appstream	All versions	`2:2.1.7-1.el9_2`
`conmon-debugsource` Red Hat:enterprise_linux:9::appstream	All versions	`2:2.1.7-1.el9_2`
`collectd-libpod-stats` Red Hat:openstack:16.1::el8	All versions	`0:1.0.4-3.el8ost`
`collectd-libpod-stats` Red Hat:openstack:16.2::el8	All versions	`0:1.0.4-3.el8ost`
`openshift-serverless-clients` Red Hat:serverless:1.0::el8	All versions	`0:1.6.1-2.el8`

Products include Fedoraproject Fedora, Golang Go, Golang Http2.

How do I fix CVE-2022-41717?

Upgrade golang.org/x/net to 0.4.0 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-2022-41717 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-41717 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Public exploit code: 1 proofs of concept on GitHub.

All Fedoraproject Fedora vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as ALSA-2023:2222, AZL-11582, AZL-33568, AZL-33573, AZL-33582, AZL-33617 and 31 more.