CVE-2026-81875

HAPI FHIR: SHCParser unbounded DEFLATE decompression causes denial of service

State
Published
Severity
7.5 High
Published
Sep 16, 2026
Updated
Sep 17, 2026
Reserved
Aug 27, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

HAPI FHIR is a complete implementation of the HL7 FHIR standard for healthcare interoperability in Java. Prior to version 6.9.12, SHCParser in org.hl7.fhir.r5/src/main/java/org/hl7/fhir/r5/elementmodel/SHCParser.java can consume attacker-controlled Smart Health Card JWT content whose header contains zip: "DEF" and whose small raw-DEFLATE payload expands to a very large value. SHCParser.decodeJWT() passes the decoded payload to SHCParser.inflate(), which accumulates all decompressed bytes in a ByteArrayOutputStream without an output-size limit before JSON parsing, and SHCParser.decompress() contains the same unbounded pattern. An application or validator service that accepts attacker-supplied SHC content can therefore suffer excessive heap allocation, severe garbage-collection pressure, request failure, process instability, or process termination. This issue is fixed in version 6.9.12.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.17.5 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-20 Improper Input Validation
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-409 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)

Affected Products

ProductVersions
org.hl7.fhir.corehapifhir
  • < 6.9.12Affected

References

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