Medium severity · published Jun 18, 2025
CVE-2025-4820
Incorrect congestion window growth by optimistic ACK
5.3
CVSS
0.9%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Impact
Cloudflare quiche was discovered to be vulnerable to incorrect congestion window growth, which could cause it to send data at a rate faster than the path might actually support.
An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit the vulnerability by first completing a handshake and initiating a congestion-controlled data transfer towards itself. Then, it could manipulate the victim's congestion control state by sending ACK frames exercising an opportunistic ACK attack; see RFC 9000 Section 21.4. The victim could grow the congestion window beyond typical expectations and allow more bytes in flight than the path might really support.
Patches
quiche 0.24.4 is the earliest version containing the fix for this issue.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.9% · higher than 58% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
QU
quiche · Cloudflare
<0.24.4 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-4820
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-4820
Vendor Advisory
https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche/security/advisories/GHSA-2v9p-3p3h-w56j
More from quiche
7.5
CVE-2026-12523
Resource exhaustion in quiche HTTP/3 and QPACK layers
7.5
CVE-2026-12707
Unbounded path event queue growth in quiche via peer-driven source connection ID rotation
7.5
CVE-2025-4821
Incorrect congestion window growth by invalid ACK ranges
7.5
CVE-2024-1765
Cloudflare Quiche (through version 0.19.1/0.20.0) was affected by an unlimited resource allocation vulnerability causing rapid increase of memory usage of the system running…
6.5
CVE-2025-7054
Infinite loop triggered by connection ID retirement
