High severity · published Jul 14, 2026
CVE-2026-12523
Resource exhaustion in quiche HTTP/3 and QPACK layers
7.5
CVSS
0.5%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Summary
Cloudflare quiche's HTTP/3 layer was discovered to be vulnerable to resource exhaustion (i.e., memory) by means of specially crafted HTTP/3 frames.
Impact
HTTP/3 defines multiple frame types to support HTTP message exchanges and connection management. Each frame has a length and a payload whose length depends on the frame type. quiche was found to be vulnerable when parsing some frame types to pre-allocating memory based on the declared length. An attacker would not need to send the number of declared bytes to trigger this issue.
In addition, quiche was found to not apply QPACK decompression limits correctly. This could allow an attacker to send specially crafted HEADERS frames that would cause more memory commitment than otherwise advertised by MAX_FIELD_SECTION_SIZE (configured by set_max_field_section_size()).
Mitigation:
*
Users are requested to upgrade to quiche 0.29.3 which is the earliest version containing the fix for this issue.
Credits: Disclosed responsibly by Sébastien Féry
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.5% · higher than 45% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
QU
quiche · Cloudflare
0.1.0 before 0.29.3 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-12523
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-12523
Vendor Advisory
https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche/security/advisories/GHSA-4fgf-9xrr-88gf
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