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

Read the record on cve.org

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

CVSSScoreVectorSource
4.06.9 MediumCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:NGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-835 Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition ('Infinite Loop')

Affected Products

ProductVersions
urllib3urllib3
  • >= 2.6.2, < 2.8.0Affected

References

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