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PYSEC-2026-1994
No affected components available
Impact
urllib3's streaming API is designed for the efficient handling of large HTTP responses by reading the content in chunks, rather than loading the entire response body into memory at once.
When streaming a compressed response, urllib3 can perform decoding or decompression based on the HTTP Content-Encoding header (e.g., gzip, deflate, br, or zstd). The library must read compressed data from the network and decompress it until the requested chunk size is met. Any resulting decompressed data that exceeds the requested amount is held in an internal buffer for the next read operation.
The decompression logic could cause urllib3 to fully decode a small amount of highly compressed data in a single operation. This can result in excessive resource consumption (high CPU usage and massive memory allocation for the decompressed data; CWE-409) on the client side, even if the application only requested a small chunk of data.
Affected usages
Applications and libraries using urllib3 version 2.5.0 and earlier to stream large compressed responses or content from untrusted sources.
stream(), read(amt=256), read1(amt=256), read_chunked(amt=256), readinto(b) are examples of urllib3.HTTPResponse method calls using the affected logic unless decoding is disabled explicitly.
Remediation
Upgrade to at least urllib3 v2.6.0 in which the library avoids decompressing data that exceeds the requested amount.
If your environment contains a package facilitating the Brotli encoding, upgrade to at least Brotli 1.2.0 or brotlicffi 1.2.0.0 too. These versions are enforced by the urllib3[brotli] extra in the patched versions of urllib3.
Credits
The issue was reported by @Cycloctane. Supplemental information was provided by @stamparm during a security audit performed by 7ASecurity and facilitated by OSTIF.
The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability.
Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.
Probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
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