Summary

Zapros: Streaming decoders ignored the requested chunk size, allowing a single compressed response chunk to allocate unbounded memory (decompression bomb)

Advisory details

Impact

Denial of service via memory exhaustion. Affects all callers who streamed compressed responses relying on the chunk size — explicit (iter_bytes(chunk_size=...)) or the default — to bound memory. The decoder ignored that bound, so a chunk could be far larger than requested and a single compressed response could overflow memory.

import gzip, zapros

# Server returns ~1 GiB of zeros gzip-compressed to ~1 MiB,
# with header: Content-Encoding: gzip
bomb = gzip.compress(b"\0" * 1_000_000_000)  # ~1 MiB on the wire

with zapros.stream("GET", "https://malicious.example/bomb") as response:
    # Caller asks for 8 KiB chunks, expecting bounded memory:
    for chunk in response.iter_bytes(chunk_size=8192):
        ...  # first `chunk` is ~1 GiB, not 8 KiB -> memory exhaustion

Patches

Upgrade to 0.14.0 or later. The decoders now bound the output of each decompression step to the requested chunk_size: gzip/deflate via zlib's max_length + unconsumed_tail, brotli via output_buffer_limit, and zstd via a bounded stream_writer. Peak memory during streaming decode is now proportional to chunk_size for all supported encodings.

Workarounds

For unpatched versions:

  • Read the still-compressed body with Response.iter_raw() / Response.async_iter_raw(), which bypass the built-in decoders, and decompress it yourself with an explicit output-size bound (e.g. zlib's max_length), aborting once a configured limit is exceeded.
  • Where feasible, send Accept-Encoding: identity to disable response compression so bodies are not decompressed client-side.
  • Avoid decoding response bodies from untrusted servers.

References