tokio-quiche: unbounded per-flow state lets a peer exhaust memory

Summary

Cloudflare tokio-quiche was found to contain an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in its HTTP/3 DATAGRAM handling. For every previously unseen flow identifier (quarter stream ID) received in a DATAGRAM frame, tokio-quiche creates and retains new, per-flow state. A remote peer can send DATAGRAMs with many distinct identifiers, causing the per-connection flow map and associated channel state to grow without bound.

Impact

Exploitation can exhaust process memory and cause a denial of service. The vulnerable code is used in both client and server configurations, so either role can be affected by a malicious peer. QUIC DATAGRAM support in tokio-quiche is enabled by default through QuicSettings::enable_dgram; applications can disable it by setting this field to false. The vulnerable HTTP/3 path is reachable only when DATAGRAM support is negotiated with the peer. Core quiche and HTTP/3 deployments without DATAGRAM support are not affected. 

Mitigation

Disable DATAGRAMs in tokio-quiche’s QuicSettings::enable_dgram.

Remediation

Upgrade to tokio-quiche version 0.23.0 or later. The fixed code creates flow state only for valid DATAGRAM-capable request streams, which are bounded by QUIC’s stream limits. To tolerate packet reordering, servers retain early DATAGRAMs in a bounded, expiring buffer, while clients discard DATAGRAMs for unknown flows.