CVE-2022-3252 — swift-nio-extras
HIGHCVE-2022-3252 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-606 vulnerability in github.com/apple/swift-nio-extras. A fix is available for github.com/apple/swift-nio-extras — see the affected versions and patch details below.
SwiftNIO Extras vulnerable to improper detection of complete HTTP body decompression
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-3252 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,166 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
github.com/apple/swift-nio-extras📦github.com/apple/swift-nio-extras📦github.com/apple/swift-nio-extrasReal-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
Improper detection of complete HTTP body decompression SwiftNIO Extras provides a pair of helpers for transparently decompressing received HTTP request or response bodies. These two objects (HTTPRequestDecompressor and HTTPResponseDecompressor) both failed to detect when the decompressed body was considered complete. If trailing junk data was appended to the HTTP message body, the code would repeatedly attempt to decompress this data and fail. This would lead to an infinite loop making no forward progress, leading to livelock of the system and denial-of-service. This issue can be triggered by any attacker capable of sending a compressed HTTP message. Most commonly this is HTTP servers, as compressed HTTP messages cannot be negotiated for HTTP requests, but it is possible that users have configured decompression for HTTP requests as well. The attack is low effort, and likely to be reached without requiring any privilege or system access. The impact on availability is high: the process immediately becomes unavailable but does not immediately crash, meaning that it is possible for the process to remain in this state until an administrator intervenes or an automated circuit breaker fires. If left unchecked this issue will very slowly exhaust memory resources due to repeated buffer allocation, but the buffers are not written to and so it is possible that the processes will not terminate for quite some time. This risk can be mitigated by removing transparent HTTP message decompression. The issue is fixed by correctly detecting the termination of the compressed body as reported by zlib and refusing to decompress further data. The issue was found by Vojtech Rylko (https://github.com/vojtarylko) and reported publicly on GitHub.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦SwiftURL | github.com/apple/swift-nio-extras | ≥ 1.11.0&&< 1.14.0 | 1.14.0 |
| 📦SwiftURL | github.com/apple/swift-nio-extras | ≥ 1.10.0&&< 1.10.3 | 1.10.3 |
| 📦SwiftURL | github.com/apple/swift-nio-extras | all versions | 1.9.2 |
Detection & 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-extras, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update github.com/apple/swift-nio-extras to 1.14.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-3252 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2022-3252 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2022-3252. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-3252 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2022-3252 across SwiftURL dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.