gRPC-Go: Heap Memory Exhaustion (OOM) via HTTP/2 DATA Frame Fragmentation

Impact

An unauthenticated remote attacker can initiate a gRPC stream and purposefully fragment their payload into millions of tiny (e.g., 1-byte) HTTP/2 DATA frames. Even if the total payload volume falls within the configured connection and stream flow-control windows, each independent fragment incurs memory overhead due to internal tracking structures and queue allocation.

Repeated fragmentation massively inflates the heap space consumed by the stream. An attacker multiplexing multiple concurrent streams can exhaust the memory bounds of the runtime, forcing a runtime panic or OutOfMemory condition and leading to a remote Denial of Service (DoS).

Patches

The change to fix this issue is merged in master and a patch release, 1.83.1, has been published that contains this fix.

Workarounds

This vulnerability is mitigated by implementing receive buffer compaction. Consecutive small data buffers are automatically coalesced into larger buffers from a shared pool once the overhead is perceived to be excessive relative to actual payload data, drastically minimizing per-frame memory overheads.

This behavior is enabled by default. A temporary escape hatch is provided via the environment variable GRPC_GO_EXPERIMENTAL_ENABLE_RECEIVE_BUFFER_COMPACTION=false to disable the feature if unforeseen issues arise, but it will be removed in a future release.