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HIGH7.5

GHSA-8xx6-hgc6-gc2m

HTTPX2: Streaming response decompression does not bound peak memory (decompression amplification)

Quick fix

GHSA-8xx6-hgc6-gc2m — httpx2: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

pip install --upgrade 'httpx2>=2.12.0'

Details

### Summary

When decoding a compressed response body (`gzip`, `deflate`, `br`, or `zstd`), HTTPX2 fully decompressed each network read before yielding content to the application. A small compressed input could therefore cause a large intermediate memory allocation, even when the application streamed the response to keep memory usage bounded.

### Details

HTTPX2's default transport reads the socket in pieces of up to 64 KiB. Before `2.12.0`, each piece was inflated completely into one intermediate allocation before any decompressed bytes were yielded.

At DEFLATE's maximum compression ratio of roughly 1032:1, a 64 KiB compressed chunk can expand to about 64 MiB in one allocation. Brotli and Zstandard responses can cause similarly large amplification. Streaming the response did not prevent these transient allocations.

### Impact

Applications that fetch resources from untrusted or attacker-influenced servers - such as webhook receivers, link unfurlers, crawlers, SSRF-reachable fetchers, and redirect followers - can experience memory pressure or out-of-memory termination when processing a malicious compressed response. No authentication or user interaction is required beyond issuing a request to the server.

### Mitigation

Upgrade to HTTPX2 `2.12.0` or later. Patched versions decompress responses incrementally with bounded intermediate buffers, including responses with multiple content encodings.

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

PyPI/httpx2
Introduced in: 0Fixed in: 2.12.0
Fixpip install --upgrade 'httpx2>=2.12.0'

References