NRDAX-T0384 - HTTP/2 Continuation Frame Flood

compute_amp · active · first seen 2026-07-13

provenance: Reproduced in NullRabbit's attack-reproduction pipeline

mechanism

The HTTP/2 decoder's header-list-size guard is size-based (maxHeaderListSize - frameSize < currentSize) and never trips when each CONTINUATION frame carries zero bytes, so no count limit exists on CONTINUATION frames following an unterminated HEADERS block (END_HEADERS=0). An attacker opens a header block and streams an unbounded sequence of zero-length CONTINUATION frames on one connection, each costing only a 9-byte frame header to send. The decoder keeps parsing every frame, monopolizing a CPU thread and producing a compute-exhaustion DoS at negligible attacker bandwidth.

instances (1)

chain	primitive	fidelity	origin	reproducer (bundle)	source
http2	http2_continuation_flood	proxy	reverse-engineered-cve	http2_continuation_flood	-

related (compute_amp)

NRDAX-T0005 - Array Deserialization Memcpy Corruption active NRDAX-T0006 - Async Runtime Blocking VM Execution active NRDAX-T0013 - Bloom Filter Divide-By-Zero Crash active NRDAX-T0076 - Expensive Debug RPC Compute Amplification active NRDAX-T0101 - Handshake Crypto Validation Bypass Crash active NRDAX-T0122 - Integer Signedness Index OOB Crash active NRDAX-T0129 - Invalid Curve Point Panic active NRDAX-T0139 - Legacy Sighash Quadratic CPU Blowup active

cite

https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0384

plain

NRDAX Registry. Technique NRDAX-T0384.

bibtex

@misc{nrdax_NRDAX_T0384,
  title = {HTTP/2 Continuation Frame Flood (NRDAX-T0384)},
  howpublished = {NRDAX Registry},
  url = {https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0384},
}

json (csl)

{
  "id": "nrdax-NRDAX-T0384",
  "type": "dataset",
  "title": "HTTP/2 Continuation Frame Flood (NRDAX-T0384)",
  "URL": "https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0384",
  "publisher": "NRDAX Registry"
}