Unbounded queuing of path validation messages in cloudflare-quiche

Impact

quiche v. 0.15.0 through 0.19.0 was discovered to be vulnerable to unbounded queuing of path validation messages, which could lead to excessive resource consumption.

QUIC path validation (RFC 9000 Section 8.2) requires that the recipient of a PATH_CHALLENGE frame responds by sending a PATH_RESPONSE. An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit the vulnerability by sending PATH_CHALLENGE frames and manipulating the connection (e.g. by restricting the peer’s congestion window size) so that PATH_RESPONSE frames can only be sent at the slower rate than they are received, leading to storage of path validation data in an unbounded queue.

Patches

Quiche versions greater than 0.19.0 address this problem.

References

CVE-2023-6193
RFC 9000 Section 8.2