urllib3 version 2.6.3 is vulnerable to a decompression bomb bypass in its streaming API (preload_content=False) when using Brotli support. The issue arises due to three independent code paths in response.py that bypass the max_length protection introduced in version 2.6.0 to mitigate CVE-2025-66471. Specifically, negative max_length values can be produced due to buffer arithmetic in read(), flush_decoder unconditionally overrides max_length to -1, and _flush_decoder() passes no limit at all, defaulting to unlimited decompression. This allows a malicious HTTP server to trigger an out-of-memory (OOM) condition by decompressing large payloads into memory, leading to a denial of service (DoS). The vulnerability affects urllib3 2.6.3 and Brotli 1.2.0 and impacts applications and libraries using requests or urllib3 to stream content from untrusted sources.
Exploitability
AV:NAC:LPR:NUI:NScope
S:UImpact
C:NI:NA:H7.5/CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HResource Management