undici's decompress interceptor decompresses response bodies according to the untrusted Content-Encoding header. While the number of content-encoding layers is capped, the total decompressed output size is unbounded and there is no configuration option to limit it. A malicious or faulty upstream can therefore return a small compressed payload, a compression bomb, that expands to hundreds of megabytes or more in client memory, an asymmetric resource consumption that can exhaust memory and crash the process.
This affects undici versions from 7.15.0 up to 7.29.1 and from 8.0.0 up to 8.10.2. Users should upgrade to undici 7.29.1 or 8.10.2.
Attack Parameters
Attack Vector
Network
Can be exploited remotely
Attack Complexity
High
Difficult to exploit
Privileges Required
None
No privileges needed
User Interaction
None
No user interaction needed
Impact Assessment
Confidentiality
None
No data leak
Integrity
None
No data modification
Availability
High
Complete denial of service
CVSS Vector v3.1