Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in the HTTP/2 implementation of mtrudel bandit allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to grow per-connection memory and CPU cost without bound via a large SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE. Bandit resizes its HPACK encoder table to whatever size the client advertises, up to 2^32-1 bytes, and indexes response headers into it. Because responses carry distinct values such as date or content-length, nothing is evicted and the table grows with every response for the life of the connection, while each lookup scans it linearly.

The SETTINGS handling in Bandit.HTTP2.Connection (lib/bandit/http2/connection.ex) passes remote_settings.header_table_size to HPAX.resize/2 with no server-side cap, and encode_headers encodes every response header as :store. Serving N responses on one connection therefore costs O(N²) CPU in the connection process.

This issue affects bandit: from 0.3.6 before 1.14.0.
Advisories

No advisories yet.

Fixes

Solution

No solution given by the vendor.


Workaround

From 0.7.0, cap the requests one HTTP/2 connection may serve, for example with http_2_options: [max_requests: 1000], so each connection and its encoder table is closed before the cost grows large. Alternatively, disable HTTP/2 with http_2_options: [enabled: false].

History

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Metrics ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'yes', 'Exploitation': 'none', 'Technical Impact': 'partial'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}


Mon, 26 Oct 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in the HTTP/2 implementation of mtrudel bandit allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to grow per-connection memory and CPU cost without bound via a large SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE. Bandit resizes its HPACK encoder table to whatever size the client advertises, up to 2^32-1 bytes, and indexes response headers into it. Because responses carry distinct values such as date or content-length, nothing is evicted and the table grows with every response for the life of the connection, while each lookup scans it linearly. The SETTINGS handling in Bandit.HTTP2.Connection (lib/bandit/http2/connection.ex) passes remote_settings.header_table_size to HPAX.resize/2 with no server-side cap, and encode_headers encodes every response header as :store. Serving N responses on one connection therefore costs O(N²) CPU in the connection process. This issue affects bandit: from 0.3.6 before 1.14.0.
Title Client-chosen HPACK encoder table size is applied uncapped, growing per-connection state with every response in Bandit
First Time appeared Mtrudel
Mtrudel bandit
Weaknesses CWE-770
CPEs cpe:2.3:a:mtrudel:bandit:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
Vendors & Products Mtrudel
Mtrudel bandit
References
Metrics cvssV4_0

{'score': 8.7, 'vector': 'CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N'}


Projects

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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: EEF

Published:

Updated: 2026-10-26T15:35:50.929Z

Reserved: 2026-10-22T09:30:02.077Z

Link: CVE-2026-110499

cve-icon Vulnrichment

Updated: 2026-10-26T15:32:29.839Z

cve-icon NVD

Status : Awaiting Analysis

Published: 2026-10-26T14:16:26.820

Modified: 2026-10-26T16:59:16.113

Link: CVE-2026-110499

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

Updated: 2026-10-26T17:30:15Z

Weaknesses