A memory leak occurs in Node.js HTTP/2 servers when a client sends WINDOW_UPDATE frames on stream 0 (connection-level) that cause the flow control window to exceed the maximum value of 2³¹-1. The server correctly sends a GOAWAY frame, but the Http2Session object is never cleaned up.
This vulnerability affects HTTP2 users on Node.js 20, 22, 24 and 25.
Weakness
The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.
Affected Software
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 | RedHat | nodejs24-1:24.14.1-2.el10_1 | * |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 | RedHat | nodejs:24-8100020260408131901.6d880403 | * |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | RedHat | nodejs:24-9070020260402152654.rhel9 | * |
| Nodejs | Ubuntu | esm-apps/xenial | * |
| Nodejs | Ubuntu | upstream | * |
Potential Mitigations
- Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
- For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
- When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
- To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.