CVE-2024-27316
HIGHCVE-2024-27316 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-770 vulnerability. 2 public exploit references exist, so weaponization risk is real. O3 Security confirms whether CVE-2024-27316 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Apache HTTP Server: HTTP/2 DoS by memory exhaustion on endless continuation frames
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2024-27316.
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-2024-27316 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE sits: patch-first territory.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 372,324 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the ≥ 90% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Description
HTTP/2 incoming headers exceeding the limit are temporarily buffered in nghttp2 in order to generate an informative HTTP 413 response. If a client does not stop sending headers, this leads to memory exhaustion.
Research use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for the affected component. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Remediation status
No patched version of the affected component has shipped for CVE-2024-27316 yet. Where your build allows, override or pin the dependency away from the vulnerable range, and apply any maintainer-recommended mitigation.
Mitigate without a patch
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 pinpoints whether CVE-2024-27316 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to CVE-2024-27316. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
Red Hat rates the security impact of this vulnerability as Moderate, in alignment with upstream Apache. The worst case scenario is memory exhaustion causing a denial of service. Once an attack has ended, the system should return to normal operations on its own. This vulnerability stems from an imperfect definition of…
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2024-27316 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2024-27316 across dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.