CVE-2022-0618 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-130 vulnerability in github.com/apple/swift-nio-http2. A fix is available for github.com/apple/swift-nio-http2 — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Denial of service via HTTP/2 HEADERS frames padding
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
github.com/apple/swift-nio-http2Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects SwiftURL packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
A program using swift-nio-http2 is vulnerable to a denial of service attack, caused by a network peer sending a specially crafted HTTP/2 frame. This attack affects all swift-nio-http2 versions from 1.0.0 to 1.19.2. It is fixed in 1.20.0 and later releases.
This vulnerability is caused by a logical error when parsing a HTTP/2 HEADERS or HTTP/2 PUSH_PROMISE frame where the frame contains padding information without any other data. This logical error caused confusion about the size of the frame, leading to a parsing error. This parsing error immediately crashes the entire process.
Sending a HEADERS frame or PUSH_PROMISE frame with HTTP/2 padding information does not require any special permission, so any HTTP/2 connection peer may send such a frame. For clients, this means any server to which they connect may launch this attack. For servers, anyone they allow to connect to them may launch such an attack.
The attack is low-effort: it takes very little resources to send an appropriately crafted frame. The impact on availability is high: receiving the frame immediately crashes the server, dropping all in-flight connections and causing the service to need to restart. It is straightforward for an attacker to repeatedly send appropriately crafted frames, so attackers require very few resources to achieve a substantial denial of service.
The attack does not have any confidentiality or integrity risks in and of itself: swift-nio-http2 is parsing the frame in memory-safe code, so the crash is safe. However, sudden process crashes can lead to violations of invariants in services, so it is possible that this attack can be used to trigger an error condition that has confidentiality or integrity risks.
The risk can be mitigated if untrusted peers can be prevented from communicating with the service. This mitigation is not available to many services.
The issue is fixed by rewriting the parsing code to correctly handle the condition. The issue was found by automated fuzzing by oss-fuzz.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦SwiftURL | github.com/apple/swift-nio-http2 | ≥ 1.0.0&&< 1.20 | 1.20 |
Affected Products
swiftnio http\/2appleDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for github.com/apple/swift-nio-http2, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update github.com/apple/swift-nio-http2 to 1.20 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-0618 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-0618 in your dependencies?
Find it across SwiftURL, including transitive dependencies.