CVE-2022-3252

CVE-2022-3252 is a high-severity vulnerability in Apple Swift-nio-extras with a CVSS 3.x base score of 7.5. It is not currently listed as actively exploited by CISA, and its EPSS exploit-prediction score is low. The underlying weakness is classified as CWE-835.

Key facts

Description

Improper detection of complete HTTP body decompression SwiftNIO Extras provides a pair of helpers for transparently decompressing received HTTP request or response bodies. These two objects (HTTPRequestDecompressor and HTTPResponseDecompressor) both failed to detect when the decompressed body was considered complete. If trailing junk data was appended to the HTTP message body, the code would repeatedly attempt to decompress this data and fail. This would lead to an infinite loop making no forward progress, leading to livelock of the system and denial-of-service. This issue can be triggered by any attacker capable of sending a compressed HTTP message. Most commonly this is HTTP servers, as compressed HTTP messages cannot be negotiated for HTTP requests, but it is possible that users have configured decompression for HTTP requests as well. The attack is low effort, and likely to be reached without requiring any privilege or system access. The impact on availability is high: the process immediately becomes unavailable but does not immediately crash, meaning that it is possible for the process to remain in this state until an administrator intervenes or an automated circuit breaker fires. If left unchecked this issue will very slowly exhaust memory resources due to repeated buffer allocation, but the buffers are not written to and so it is possible that the processes will not terminate for quite some time. This risk can be mitigated by removing transparent HTTP message decompression. The issue is fixed by correctly detecting the termination of the compressed body as reported by zlib and refusing to decompress further data. The issue was found by Vojtech Rylko (https://github.com/vojtarylko) and reported publicly on GitHub.

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2022-3252?
Improper detection of complete HTTP body decompression SwiftNIO Extras provides a pair of helpers for transparently decompressing received HTTP request or response bodies. These two objects (HTTPRequestDecompressor and HTTPResponseDecompressor) both failed to detect when the decompressed body was considered complete. If trailing junk data was appended to the HTTP message body, the code would repeatedly attempt to decompress this data and fail. This would lead to an infinite loop making no forward progress, leading to livelock of the system and denial-of-service. This issue can be triggered by any attacker capable of sending a compressed HTTP message. Most commonly this is HTTP servers, as compressed HTTP messages cannot be negotiated for HTTP requests, but it is possible that users have configured decompression for HTTP requests as well. The attack is low effort, and likely to be reached without requiring any privilege or system access. The impact on availability is high: the process immediately becomes unavailable but does not immediately crash, meaning that it is possible for the process to remain in this state until an administrator intervenes or an automated circuit breaker fires. If left unchecked this issue will very slowly exhaust memory resources due to repeated buffer allocation, but the buffers are not written to and so it is possible that the processes will not terminate for quite some time. This risk can be mitigated by removing transparent HTTP message decompression. The issue is fixed by correctly detecting the termination of the compressed body as reported by zlib and refusing to decompress further data. The issue was found by Vojtech Rylko (https://github.com/vojtarylko) and reported publicly on GitHub.
How severe is CVE-2022-3252?
CVE-2022-3252 has a CVSS 3.x base score of 7.5, rated high severity. It is exploitable over network with low attack complexity, requires no privileges and no user interaction. Impact on confidentiality is none, integrity none, and availability high.
Is CVE-2022-3252 being actively exploited?
It is not currently listed in CISA's KEV catalog. Its EPSS exploit-prediction score is 1% (50th percentile), an estimate of the probability of exploitation in the next 30 days.
What products are affected by CVE-2022-3252?
CVE-2022-3252 affects Apple Swift-nio-extras. See the affected-products list for the exact vulnerable versions.
How do I fix CVE-2022-3252?
Review the linked vendor and NVD advisories for patched versions and mitigations, then upgrade or apply the recommended workaround. Given its high severity, prioritise patching exposed systems.
When was CVE-2022-3252 published?
CVE-2022-3252 was published on 2022-09-21 and last updated on 2026-06-17.

References

Affected products (1)

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