What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-50247: h2o QUIC state exhaustion DoS

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-12-12 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-770

Description

h2o is an HTTP server with support for HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. The QUIC stack (quicly), as used by H2O up to commit 43f86e5 (in version 2.3.0-beta and prior), is susceptible to a state exhaustion attack. When H2O is serving HTTP/3, a remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability to progressively increase the memory retained by the QUIC stack. This can eventually cause H2O to abort due to memory exhaustion. The vulnerability has been resolved in commit d67e81d03be12a9d53dc8271af6530f40164cd35. HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 are not affected by this vulnerability as they do not use QUIC. Administrators looking to mitigate this issue without upgrading can disable HTTP/3 support.

Affected products

• h2o: through 2.2.6; 2.3.0-beta1, 2.3.0-beta2

References

• https://github.com/h2o/h2o/commit/d67e81d03be12a9d53dc8271af6530f40164cd35
• https://github.com/h2o/h2o/security/advisories/GHSA-2ch5-p59c-7mv6
• https://github.com/h2o/h2o/commit/d67e81d03be12a9d53dc8271af6530f40164cd35
• https://github.com/h2o/h2o/security/advisories/GHSA-2ch5-p59c-7mv6

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