CVE-2026-97688
urllib3: Chunked Deflate streaming can enter an infinite loop
- State
- Published
- Severity
- 6.9 Medium
- Published
- Sep 29, 2026
- Updated
- Sep 29, 2026
- Reserved
- Sep 24, 2026
Description
urllib3 is an HTTP client library for Python. From 2.6.2 until 2.8.0, HTTPResponse.stream and HTTPResponse.read_chunked can enter an infinite loop because the Deflate decoder retains trailing bytes as unconsumed input after reaching end-of-stream and repeatedly decodes them without progress. The issue occurs when an untrusted server sends a chunked Deflate response whose decoded body exceeds a positive finite chunk size and whose encoded body has trailing bytes, specifically a response with Transfer-Encoding: chunked and Content-Encoding: deflate, content decoding enabled, and the positive finite amt=N streaming chunk size. The attack mechanism is that a malicious server returns a compressed chunked response with trailing bytes after the Deflate stream. The impact is excessive CPU usage and a request that does not complete, and network read timeouts do not interrupt the loop because no further socket read occurs. This issue is fixed in version 2.8.0.
Scores
| CVSS | Score | Vector | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.0 | 6.9 Medium | CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N | GitHub_M |
Weaknesses
- CWE-835 Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition ('Infinite Loop')
Affected Products
| Product | Versions |
|---|---|
urllib3urllib3 |
|
References
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