Unauthenticated server crash via oversized stack allocation
Published Jul 10, 2026 · Updated Jul 10, 2026
Stack exhaustion in H2O allows remote attackers to crash affected HTTP/3 servers by sending a crafted QPACK instruction. The QPACK decoder in lib/http3/qpack.c uses alloca for a peer-controlled Huffman-encoded header name, reserving up to roughly 800 KB on each worker thread stack. Exploitation requires HTTP/3 to be enabled and a musl libc build using its default 128 KB pthread stack, where the allocation reaches the guard page and terminates the server with SIGSEGV.
Summary
What happened
Stack exhaustion in H2O allows remote attackers to crash affected HTTP/3 servers by sending a crafted QPACK instruction. The QPACK decoder in lib/http3/qpack.c uses alloca for a peer-controlled Huffman-encoded header name, reserving up to roughly 800 KB on each worker thread stack. Exploitation requires HTTP/3 to be enabled and a musl libc build using its default 128 KB pthread stack, where the allocation reaches the guard page and terminates the server with SIGSEGV.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2026-55213
- Published
- Jul 10, 2026
- Updated
- Jul 10, 2026
- Vendor
- H2O Project
- Product
- H2O
- Classifications
- CWE-789, T1499.004
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- unauthenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Jul 10, 2026CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Jul 10, 2026Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
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- Affected versionversion=< edd7a120bfc4af11ac0cbebce2a43cc1f93f9af1
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What is affected?
Published CVSS scores
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Attacks
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Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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