Attack ChainAIDerived
Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain
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AccessRoute attacker-controlled HTTP traffic past sensor
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DeliveryServe many small brotli compression bombs in one flow
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ExploitBypass per-transaction decompress limit repeatedly
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ExecutionExhaust rust/htp decompression CPU
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ImpactDegrade packet processing / lose monitoring visibility
Vulnerability Assessment
| Weakness |
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A06:2025 - Insecure Design
ASVS 5.0
V2 - Validation and Business Logic Resource consumption limits
MITRE ATT&CK
1 technique across 1 tactic: Impact The technique list with ATT&CK links and the kill-chain view is part of the Basic plan and up. |
| Exploitation Conditions | Exploitation requires that Suricata's response-body-decompress-layer-limit option be enabled - the description explicitly gates the flaw on this configuration. The attacker must also be able to place attacker-influenced HTTP/1 traffic (repeated small brotli compression bombs across many transactions in one flow) in a path the sensor inspects; Suricata is a monitoring engine, so this typically means inducing monitored hosts to fetch from a malicious server rather than connecting to Suricata directly. Limiting factors: affected only in versions 8.0.0-8.0.5 (fixed 8.0.6), the non-default layer-limit configuration requirement, and the need for sustained attacker-controlled compressed HTTP responses; impact is availability/monitoring degradation only, with no confidentiality or integrity effect. |
| Impact | The CVSS vector (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H, base 7.5) reflects a remote, unauthenticated availability-only impact with no confidentiality or integrity effect - consistent with the CWE-400 resource-exhaustion description. However, this is not a classic remotely-exposed service DoS: Suricata is a passive/inline network sensor, so the 'attacker' does not authenticate to Suricata but instead generates HTTP flows (serving repeated small brotli compression bombs) that the sensor inspects. A critical mitigating signal is the config gate stated in the description - the flaw is only triggerable 'with response-body-decompress-layer-limit enabled,' which is a non-default deployment condition the raw CVSS AC:L does not capture. No EPSS score, KEV listing, or POC was provided in the input; there is no public exploit identified at time of analysis and no evidence of active exploitation, so this is a real but conditional availability risk rather than a confirmed widespread threat. Impact is degradation of monitoring/packet-processing (potential loss of visibility), which for a security-monitoring engine is meaningful but is defensive-tooling impact, not compromise of protected assets. |
| Exploit ScenarioDerived | An attacker who can cause a Suricata sensor to inspect attacker-influenced HTTP/1 traffic (e.g., by luring monitored clients to a malicious server, or on a network segment where responses are observed) serves many small brotli-compressed responses within a single flow. Because Suricata limits decompression per transaction but not the number of compression bombs per flow, each transaction forces expensive decompression in rust/htp, exhausting CPU and degrading packet processing until monitoring visibility is lost or the engine is effectively denied service. No public exploit code was identified in the provided data. |
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Alert meAnalysisAIv1 – Sep 18, 2026
Suricata 8.0.0 through 8.0.5 can be degraded into a denial-of-service condition by a remote, unauthenticated attacker who streams repeated small brotli-compressed HTTP/1 responses through a single inspected flow. The HTTP/1 parser caps the decompression work done per transaction but does not cap how many compression bombs a flow may submit, so each transaction forces the Rust htp decompression path to burn CPU until packet processing slows and monitoring visibility is lost; availability-only impact, with no confidentiality or integrity effect (CVSS base 7.5, CWE-400). Exploitation is gated on the non-default response-body-decompress-layer-limit setting being enabled and on the sensor seeing attacker-influenced traffic, and no public exploit or in-the-wild activity is identified at time of analysis; the vendor fixed the issue in Suricata 8.0.6.
RemediationAI
The primary fix is to upgrade to Suricata 8.0.6 or later (vendor-released patch: 8.0.6), available from the release tag https://github.com/OISF/suricata/releases/tag/suricata-8.0.6 and described in GHSA-j9cx-w9xm-5x84 and https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/issues/8694. After upgrading, the per-flow bomb cap defaults to three compressed responses before decompression is skipped for that flow; it is configurable through the new max-nb-compression-bombs setting exposed by htp_config_set_max_nb_compression_bombs, and alerts can be raised with the shipped rule sid 2221059 ('SURICATA HTTP compression bomb limit reached', app-layer-event:http.compression_bomb_limit_reached) or an equivalent custom signature, so tune the limit and confirm the signature is enabled rather than assuming the default is right for your traffic profile. On unpatched 8.0.0-8.0.5 sensors the only directly effective mitigation is to disable response-body-decompress-layer-limit, which removes the vulnerable code path entirely; the trade-off is that Suricata will no longer decompress and inspect layered/compressed HTTP response bodies, creating a real detection blind spot for encodings, so this should be a temporary measure paired with a tracking ticket. Additional compensating controls that reduce but do not eliminate exposure include disabling brotli/gzip response-body decompression for HTTP, denying or rate-limiting outbound access to untrusted HTTP servers from monitored hosts (hard to enforce and not practical in most environments), and monitoring for sustained CPU saturation or packet-drop counters in Suricata stats, which indicates the sensor is already losing visibility; none of these restore the missing per-flow budget, so patching remains the only complete fix. No public exploit code has been identified at time of analysis, so prioritization should follow standard availability-impact patching for internet-exposed or high-throughput sensors.
Affected VersionsENISA
Affected Packages
Source: OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities)
Affects your stack
Affects 1 package in euvd
Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.
Technical ContextAI · show details
The flaw lives in LibHTP's Rust decompression subsystem (rust/htp), which Suricata's HTTP/1 application-layer parser uses to inflate or brotli-decode response bodies when response-body-decompress-layer-limit is enabled. Root cause is CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption): the parser maintained a per-transaction decompression work budget (including a 100,000-unit time limit) but tracked no flow-wide budget for how many tiny, high-ratio brotli payloads - 'compression bombs' - could be delivered. Each of these cheap-to-send, expensive-to-inflate responses forced a full decompression attempt, so CPU consumption scaled with the number of transactions rather than being capped by the size of any single body. The upstream fix introduces a per-flow counter (ConnectionParser.bombs, a u8) with a default limit of three bombs (DEFAULT_BOMB_NB_LIMIT = 3) and a new C API setter htp_config_set_max_nb_compression_bombs / Rust Options::set_max_bombs; once the limit is reached, decompression is skipped for the remainder of the flow and a new HtpLogCode::COMPRESSION_BOMB_LIMIT_REACHED event is emitted. Suricata surfaces this through a new decoder anomaly, app-layer-event:http.compression_bomb_limit_reached, exposed to signature engines via rules/http-events.rules sid 2221059 ('SURICATA HTTP compression bomb limit reached'), with src/app-layer-htp.c registering the corresponding decoder event. Note that CPE data (cpe:2.3:a:oisf:suricata) is unversioned, so the precise affected window must be taken from the advisory and commit history: 8.0.0 up to, but not including, 8.0.6.
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Severity by source
AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Network-triggered availability exhaustion with no auth (PR:N), but the required response-body-decompress-layer-limit configuration and sustained bomb submission raise complexity to AC:H; no C/I impact.
Primary rating from Vendor (GitHub_M).
CVSS VectorVendor: GitHub_M
Lifecycle Timeline
2DescriptionCVE.org
Suricata is a network Intrusion Detection System, Intrusion Prevention System and Network Security Monitoring engine. From 8.0.0 until 8.0.6, the HTTP/1 parser limits decompression work per transaction but does not limit how many small brotli compression bombs a single flow can submit. With response-body-decompress-layer-limit enabled, repeated compressed responses make the decompression paths in rust/htp perform expensive work for every transaction, degrading packet processing and potentially causing loss of monitoring visibility or denial of service. This issue is fixed in version 8.0.6.
Technical POC Analysis
Evidence caveat: the supplied evidence is the GitHub advisory (GHSA-j9cx-w9xm-5x84), the CVE summary and the vendor workaround text.
Full technical POC analysis - root cause, step-by-step exploitation and patch breakdown - is part of the Pro and Business plans.
Executive ViewAI
Suricata network intrusion detection deployments running versions 8.0.0 through 8.0.5 can be pushed into a denial-of-service state by a remote attacker, degrading or eliminating the network visibility that security operations depends on. Exploitation requires a non-default decompression setting to be enabled and attacker-influenced traffic to reach the sensor, and no public exploit has been identified at time of analysis, so this is a configuration-dependent resilience risk rather than an imminent compromise path. Leadership should care because the affected asset is the monitoring layer itself: a successful attack can blind detection across the environment while the underlying network and business systems continue to run.
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Threat Intelligence Overview
How this decision was reached
The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.
What every action level means
SSVC AssessmentENISA
Priority Score
Attack Technique
Denial of Service attacks render applications or systems unavailable by overwhelming resources or triggering failure conditions.
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EUVD-2026-83390
NVD
CVE.org
EPSS
Vulnrichment
GitHub
VulDB
Exploit-DB