CVE-2026-97688

Published: October 2, 2026Last modified: October 7, 2026

Description

urllib3 is an HTTP client library for Python. From 2.6.2 until 2.8.0, HTTPResponse.stream and HTTPResponse.read_chunked can enter an infinite loop because the Deflate decoder retains trailing bytes as unconsumed input after reaching end-of-stream and repeatedly decodes them without progress. The issue occurs when an untrusted server sends a chunked Deflate response whose decoded body exceeds a positive finite chunk size and whose encoded body has trailing bytes, specifically a response with Transfer-Encoding: chunked and Content-Encoding: deflate, content decoding enabled, and the positive finite amt=N streaming chunk size. The attack mechanism is that a malicious server returns a compressed chunked response with trailing bytes after the Deflate stream. The impact is excessive CPU usage and a request that does not complete, and network read timeouts do not interrupt the loop because no further socket read occurs. This issue is fixed in version 2.8.0.

Status

References

• https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/commit/ea2ad7b21a80da3632f80016526a18864586077f
• https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/releases/tag/2.8.0
• https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/security/advisories/GHSA-gh4c-6fx4-qh6g