Intel

AIKIDO-2026-11042

nginx is vulnerable to Resource Exhaustion

Resource Exhaustion Pre-CVE
Found by Aikido Intel before public disclosure or CVE publication.
Published Today

75

High Risk

This Affects:

OSnginx
1.9.5 - 1.29.7
Fixed in 1.29.8
Are you affected? Scan for Free

TL;DR

nginx HTTP/2 request handling does not cap the number of request header fields independently from decoded header size. A client can use HPACK indexed references to send many tiny header fields cheaply, then stall the response stream so per-request allocations remain live. Pre-fix servers can suffer remote memory exhaustion and availability loss from a small number of HTTP/2 connections. The fix adds the max_headers directive with a default limit and rejects requests that exceed it.

Who does this affect?

You are affected if you are using a version that falls within the vulnerable range and HTTP/2 is enabled.

Background info

nginx is vulnerable to Resource Exhaustion in versions 1.9.5 - 1.29.7.

How to fix this

Upgrade the nginx library to the patch version.