CVE-2026-54556
CVE-2026-54556 — Http4s: HTTP/2 Denial of Service with Ember Backend
Http4s is a Scala interface for HTTP services. Prior to 0.23.35 and 1.0.0-M47, an unauthenticated HTTP/2 peer can cause an out-of-memory denial of service in the Ember backend with HTTP/2 enabled. The Hpack wrapper in ember-core/shared/src/main/scala/org/http4s/ember/core/h2/Hpack.scala concatenates HEADERS and CONTINUATION frame fragments and decodes them into a single List, but maxHeaderSize accounting does not include indexed headers or HPACK per-header overhead. A small compressed header block can therefore expand into a much larger decoded representation that remains in memory for processing. Servers exposed to untrusted HTTP/2 traffic and clients directed to an untrusted HTTP/2 server are affected, and concurrent malicious connections can exhaust the process heap. This issue is fixed in versions 0.23.35 and 1.0.0-M47.
Published Updated Sources: cvelistV5, GitHub_M
Triage
Is it exploited, how likely is exploitation, what does it touch, and how severe do the scoring sources call it.
Exploitation
Unreported
no source claims exploitation
EPSS
0%
chance of exploitation in 30 days
CVSS base
8.2
HIGH
CISA SSVC assessment
Three decision points CISA publishes for the CVEs it assesses · SSVC 2.0.3. A stakeholder decision, not a severity score.
Exploitation
None
none · proof-of-concept · active
Automatable
Yes
can an attacker script all four kill-chain steps
Technical impact
Partial
partial · total control of the vulnerable component
Affected scope
The catalog records vendors and products as separate lists, not pairs, so which product belongs to which vendor is not something this page can say.
Vendors (2)
Products (4)
Every base score collected
Sources score independently and disagree; each row says who scored it and under which version.
| Score | Version | Severity | Expl. | Impact | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8.2 | CVSS 4.0 | HIGH | — | — | cvelistV5 |
Weakness & attack patterns
- CWE-409
Detection
Read off the CVSS vector and the weakness class. Starting points, not rules we have tested.
- Search application, proxy, and WAF logs for requests touching /2, /shared/src/main/scala/org/http4s/ember/core/h2/Hpack.scala.
References
4 on the record
- github.com/http4s/http4s/security/advisories/GHSA-vmm3-xgcx-67hm
x_refsource_CONFIRM
- github.com/http4s/http4s/commit/6e8eccd64a6a74ab4811897881e95e0e1b3a818e
x_refsource_MISC
- github.com/http4s/http4s/releases/tag/v0.23.35
x_refsource_MISC
- github.com/http4s/http4s/releases/tag/v1.0.0-M47
x_refsource_MISC
Elsewhere on this site
- http4severy CVE for this vendor
- org http4severy CVE for this vendor
- CWE-409other pages naming this weakness
Not in any source we poll
Listed rather than left blank: an empty field and an unmeasured one look identical on screen, and only one is a reason to look elsewhere.
- No confirmed IOCs, IP addresses, domains, file hashes, or malware artifacts supplied.
- No organization-specific asset inventory, compensating-control status, or patch deployment evidence supplied.
- No exploit packet captures, log samples, or incident case IDs supplied.