When a stream reaches the CLOSED state, stream_state returns the concurrency slot and clears most of the stream's keys, but the entry itself stays in the connection stream table and nothing in the distribution removes it. Stream identifiers increase monotonically, so a peer can open and close streams on one connection indefinitely, each close leaving a residual entry that is retained for the life of the connection.
SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS does not bound this. That setting caps how many streams are live at once and is enforced, while the growth is made of streams the cap has already released, so it accumulates with concurrency never exceeding one. The client keeps the same table and grows the same way against a hostile server.
Measured against a server built on this module, roughly 920 bytes are retained per closed stream for about 19 bytes on the wire, so 100,000 sequential streams on one connection grow server resident memory by about 88 MiB. The streams are ordinary requests that the application accepts and completes.
Analysis
Analysis and contextual insights are available on OpenCVE Cloud.
Default status is the baseline for the product, each version can override it (e.g. patched versions marked unaffected).
| Vendor | Product | Default status | Versions | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| unaffected |
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Vendor Solution
Upgrade to Protocol-HTTP2 1.14 or later.
Vendor Workaround
For deployments that are not able to upgrade to Protocol-HTTP2 1.14, close each connection after a fixed number of requests, which discards its stream table.
Tracking
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Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:00:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Protocol::HTTP2 versions before 1.14 for Perl allow memory exhaustion via closed streams that stream_state never removes from the connection stream table. When a stream reaches the CLOSED state, stream_state returns the concurrency slot and clears most of the stream's keys, but the entry itself stays in the connection stream table and nothing in the distribution removes it. Stream identifiers increase monotonically, so a peer can open and close streams on one connection indefinitely, each close leaving a residual entry that is retained for the life of the connection. SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS does not bound this. That setting caps how many streams are live at once and is enforced, while the growth is made of streams the cap has already released, so it accumulates with concurrency never exceeding one. The client keeps the same table and grows the same way against a hostile server. Measured against a server built on this module, roughly 920 bytes are retained per closed stream for about 19 bytes on the wire, so 100,000 sequential streams on one connection grow server resident memory by about 88 MiB. The streams are ordinary requests that the application accepts and completes. | |
| Title | Protocol::HTTP2 versions before 1.14 for Perl allow memory exhaustion via closed streams that stream_state never removes from the connection stream table | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-401 | |
| References |
|
Subscriptions
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MITRE
Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: CPANSec
Published:
Updated: 2026-09-07T20:07:29.934Z
Reserved: 2026-07-17T08:26:33.147Z
Link: CVE-2026-16028
Vulnrichment
No data.
NVD
Status : Received
Published: 2026-09-07T19:17:25.927
Modified: 2026-09-07T19:17:25.927
Link: CVE-2026-16028
Redhat
No data.
OpenCVE Enrichment
Updated: 2026-09-07T20:30:16Z
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CWE-401
Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime