Broccoli2Shell: Brotli decoder RCE in Node.js, Python and more | Hacker News Reader

Broccoli2Shell: Brotli decoder RCE in Node.js, Python and more

broccoli2shell.com

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/python-packages-vulnerable-node2...

I see some irony here. For a period of time, Google chose not to include JPEG XL in Chrome because vulnerabilities in the library could compromise the software - a legitimate concern. Yet, Google is the author of the Brotli data compression format a decade before the JPEG XL drama, and was happy to use it in Chrome and encourage others to use the library, despite the fact that it also increases the attack surface.

1. People change their minds over time.

2. JXL is waaay more complex than Brotli so the risk of vulnerable implementation is also higher.

They should have demanded more rigor from the Brotli library, same for countless other dependencies chromium has. But there's no irony.

Brotli reduces their compute costs, whereas JPEG XL reduces storage which at least historically is cheaper than compute?

From a browser point-of-view, the real questions are about data size (if you can get the wireless interface back to a low power state, you’re winning on power benchmarks), about decompression cost (again, power benchmarks), and decompression time (for performance benchmarks and user-perceived performance).

Storage and compression compute costs aren’t really relevant — only insofar as if there’s very little adoption, the security risk of exposing the code is there but isn’t providing user benefit.

This is getting real close to "yet you participate in society, curious." Yes, Google chose not to use some software and chose to use other software. It's not ironic to decline to use some software because it increases the attack surface, and then find out that it's not enough and the software you did choose to use is vulnerable. It's just unfortunate.

My reading of the critique is that the criteria was unevenly applied. Decompression vulnerabilities exist in both libraries. They rejected one on the basis that it expanded the attack surface area, but accepted the other, despite similar claims applying to it as well.

It's pretty far from the "yet you participate in society" anti-pattern.

They thought one was worth it and the other was not. That’s only similar if you ignore the concept of tradeoffs being different.

Things like Rust in Chromium weren’t even being talked about back when Brotli was introduced to Chromium.

I think Chromium as a project would be happier if they had less unsafe code in general, and holding new dependencies (especially those like media formats, which have a long history of security issues) to that standard doesn’t seem particularly surprising.

There’s always going to be trade-offs: how much benefit does this provide (users, developers) compared with how much risk does it incur (safe/unsafe code, quantity of code you’re now on the line for the security of).

(And that’s taking that reason to not support JPEG XL at face value, ignoring any debate about it.)

Sandbox + more Rust: vulnerabilities axed down.

Well, don't worry. libjxl includes the brotli library, too, so it's also vulnerable to this.

https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/pull/5062/commits/269661f71...

> reported it as unauthenticated remote code execution that works in both directions

> but it wasn't recognized as a security issue at the time and no release shipped with the fix until now

I'm always getting my dangerous RCE bugs mixed up with my harmless RCE bugs.

I'm curious how this was reported and fixed back in Feb but nobody recognized the importance. A case of AI automation and nobody at the wheel?

I'm not seeing any source for the claim that OpenAI discovered this in February. The source that the article links (a tweet by OpenAI) doesn't claim that.

Exatly, it was patched silently, OpenaAI just discovered that patch, and that it has upstream effects in NodeJS etc.

No matter who discovered it, there was a patch in late February. One can excuse them for describing the commit as something ordinary to avoid alerting the baddies (traditional "disclosure window" etc. stuff) but it's absurd to me that the corresponding releases, with no other code changes (per the commit history), took almost 8 months.

Mozilla found and reported it as an RCE in April: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2029458

[Edit: I was inattentive and replied twice in different ways, thinking they were to different parent comments; I've now merged my thoughts and edited them to be more coherent.]

> reported

This is Mozilla's own discussion of the issue, though. There's mention of

> https://github.com/google/brotli/blob/master/SECURITY.md suggests that it should go through Google's regular vulnerability reporting process. I don't have any more specific knowledge around this library, however.

but that doesn't establish that this was done.

If it was done, then I think we deserve answers about why it took Google almost 8 months to release a new version of a common dependency, applying a security patch (and no other changes!) when the vulnerability was known at least 6 months ago (and possibly the full 8 months ago) to cause RCE.

If I'm understanding the report correctly, the patch was applied in Firefox's vendored copy within days, and available in 151 and I guess some 150.0.x release. And also they were supposedly beaten to the punch:

> Probably we should update to cfa184a997ac19454d5a3ae97f6d600aac2445a6 which was rolled into chromium 2 weeks ago. If there are other recent sec fixes this would pick them up

It seems even more embarrassing if chromium got the patch but Chrome didn't. And if Chrome did, then it's that much more appalling not to see a patched separate release for so long.

(I was confused trying to go through the technical details, though: the "affected code" seems to have very little overlap with the code actually altered by the patch.)

Just as a follow-up: elsewhere in (or at least via) the thread I found user vanschelven's write-ups

https://www.bugsink.com/blog/http2shell-timeline/

https://www.bugsink.com/blog/bye-bye-brotli/

and they cover the timeline better than I do.

To me, the surprising part is how many of these implement brotli compression of request (not just response) bodies, given how obscure a feature that is.

In any case all this sensationalism is starting to get annoying. Patch your stuff and move on.

Edit: actually, between all the sensationalism, its hard to tell from the article how many of these actually support brotli compressed request bodies in common configs vs some other use of brotli (which is bad but nowhere near as critical)

I think the issue is that the servers "silently" support brotli. Then nobody uses it, but the attacker can still abuse the feature.

So as a hotfix I block this on my reverse proxy.

But is that actually true?

It seems like node supports it with body parser enabled.

But im having trouble finding any docs suggesting anything else supports it on inbound requests.

Obviously there are other scenarios where it is exploitable, but it is a much less severe vuln if the attacker must first force the program to make an outbound request to a server of its chosing rather than just connect to a vulnerable server.

Asp.Net adds Brotli support if you "UseRequestDecompression" or "UseResponseCompression".

DotNet, however, has it's own C# Brotli implementation.

The idea is to identify brotli encoding in the content-encoding header and block that on nginx. This shouldn't reach vulnerable brotli parser in node.

I hope my assets are not connecting to malicious servers, otherwise yes, I have a problem.

According to Claude when I asked it to audit one of our Python applications, there are scenarios where Brolti can be used only when some Python library detects that the C library is installed on the system. So your Brolti-ness can depend on which machine your code runs on. Ymmv, it didn't look to be a practical possibility in our code so I didn't probe further.

These chat bots always hedge like that. They will never give you a straight answer, it's always "depending on version and build configuration and system configuration".

Investigate yourself. Read the documentation. Grep for brotli in the source. Don't blindly trust a chat bot when it says it "might happen in certain configurations".

Chat bot lol. It did all of those things including scanning the binary. I ran it after doing my own (albeit more limited, but maximal-human) investigation.

Is that meant to be a response to what I wrote or did you reply to the wrong comment

I've noticed the newer frontier models are a lot better about this and are willing to give concrete answers, where before even in 90/10 scenarios they would always be wishy-washy espousing the "it depends on the circumstances" BS.

The only reply to this criticizes the hedging, but I think it's actually true and it does make it harder to tell if you're vulnerable to this. And on top of that, quite a few systems have brotli installed by necessity. On Debian 12, for example, I have the following dependency chain on a VPS I run:

grub-pc -> grub-common -> libfreetype6 -> libbrotli1

which is really nasty.

Cloudflare has this amazing feature where it accepts compressed payloads and forwards them to unsuspecting backends. Can be weaponized in many ways.

I wonder if we'll see more of this thanks to AI. Extremely complex features that nobody uses and that were easy to add, which incidentally tremendously expand the attack surface. One would hope that maintainer would be wise to avoid that, but for how long?

I think so, especially vibe coded software. I think hackers have the advantage now and defenders need to limit attack surface more rigorously.

Unfortunately that means understanding and limiting dependencies of developers... Yea, good luck.

My popcorn is ready. My servers are not.

I'm not saying that my experience translates 1:1. As a child of domestic violence, all I can say is that it never gets better. Sadly, my feeling is that the violence will only escalate from here. If you look at the bright side, you can earn your stripes as a legitimate infosec engineer and prove your worth to the industry and the world.

I'm sorry that happened to you. I tend to agree that the race to the bottom will continue.

And don't worry about my stripes, I'm mostly talking about my hobby self-hosted apps. If anything, should someone hack them I'll have a funny article to post on my blog. Professionally, I do things differently.

https://github.com/tmux/tmux/pull/5709/changes it is already happening. Nice 50 lines of C-code to add support for kernel-keyrings which no userland software uses and literally is a one-line config-option.

My experience with Brotli is from back when all the hype was mobile first and India etc was super mobile first so all these social networks lost their mind optimizing for request success and speed. So they were going crazy over micro-wins like that.

Why would request compression be obscure? When you support posting big forms, requests get big too, so why not compress them?

Much prefer the Broccoli2Shell name & site (for the same vuln): https://broccoli2shell.com/. For starters, I'm pretty sure you can hit this without HTTP if you do any manual Brotli decoding, HTTP just happens to be the most common case that comes up.

Ok, we've belatedly changed to that from https://www.aikido.dev/blog/python-packages-vulnerable-node2.... I'll put the other link in the top text as well.

What about merging up with the already ongoing discussion which needed a url cleanup anyways https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50216791

Brotli2Shell seems to be a more appropriate name for this.

Not when you're prioritising sensationalism over accuracy. Everyone's heard of HTTP, but hardly anyone's heard of brotli.

call it GoogleBrotli2Shell then.

There's this other name for the same vuln: https://broccoli2shell.com/

Article claims OpenAI found this in February, but I don’t think that’s correct. I think Google made a change to the Brotli source code in February that fixes the issue, but hadn’t realized it was a security issue and therefore hadn’t cut a release.

Yeah that doesn't make a lot of sense that they reported it but also nobody knew it was a security issue..

Maybe an LLM just happened to do one of those "while I'm here" fixes in Feb and because nobody reviews anything anymore..

"Fixed reading too many bytes."

LGTM!

Edit: I was close! "Detect and report invalid stream earlier." Could have been a person.

> Could have been a person.

The commit is attributed to "eustas" (Eugene Kliuchnikov) on the Google GitHub repo, who is the primary contributor to the Brotli project by a wide margin going back to 2015; so I think we can reasonably say it was.

Thank you! Of course! I do believe these cases are dreams for LLM vendors to advertize themselves regardless truth, and many believe trends over actual evidence...

Please do consider sharing the actual evidence to keep in the history, and respect actual human authors involved, their effort, time, and humane attitude... for discoveries, competition, actual achievements to learn from and get inspiration...

Mozilla reported it as an RCE in April

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2029458

A few month ago, everyone was advising to use cool-downs in your package upgrades. Now we're constantly overriding those because security incidents will be exploited immediately. Guess that's just how it's gonna be from now on.

It used to be a flex to say you deploy daily but it’s going to become a necessity just to keep up with the vulns

CI/CD — Continuous Incidents, Continuous Defense.

Yeah, obviously? Deploy fixes to security issues which apply to you as soon as possible, deploy random feature additions and non-critical bug fixes after some cooldown.

As always, the easiest way to manage this is to have as few dependencies as possible. If you have a lockfile with thousands of entries, you won't be able to go through them and decide which upgrades are legitimate urgent security updates and which can wait. If you have 10? You'll manage.

Exactly.

Security fixes for actively exploited vulnerabilities demand an emergency response. The risk of introducing new, unknown flaws is less than risk of having an active known exploited vulnerability.

However, absent the risk of a KEV, that changes the equation. Now the risks of code changes causing breaking changes plus the risk of supply chain attacks is greater than the risk of having to put some thought and time in to manage your software library versions.

It's not like AI created this distinction, either. Neither did CI/CD. This is standard systems administration -- literally ISO/IEC 20000 ITSM. It's exactly why, traditionally, new features are often limited to major versions. It's why binary compatibility was a huge issue with RHES 20 years ago, and why distros pin versions and backport security and selective bug fixes. A developer that doesn't know this is telling on themselves why they shouldn't have write access to production. Stability matters a lot because we like to get paychecks.

That's why it's important to practice your processes for both shipping quickly and overriding cooldowns. There's a baseline of things which are not easy to exploit where you want to patch on a regular cadence and the risk posed by a supply chain attack is greater than the risk of an attacker having enough of a footprint inside your systems to escalate. The fact that sometimes you have a specific situation like this where that's not true doesn't mean that 9 times out of 10 the cooldown was the better risk-reduction strategy.

A cooldown is a coarse way to deal with “supply chain security” — and that’s mostly a question of how much you trust your dependencies.

You may well (and probably should) trust the maintainers and release process of Brotli, Node.js, PHP, etc. security releases more than you trust some-random-JS package deep in your front end dependency graph.

You want to reduce the risk of introducing a compromised dependency into your product, and that’s largely a question of how much you trust upstream.

git for windows is vulnerable even in its latest release (2.56.0.windows.3), careful pulling repos over https from random ass servers (prolly uncommon but hey). they already merged the fix on the repo, it's just in a snapshot build only; should prolly arrive on Monday (2.56.0.windows.4).

also affects codex (gui), which ships its own git, could be more of a problem there, when the LLMs get quirky at night. still unlikely to be a problem though.

speaking of, update codex (and wipe its cache at ~/.cache/codex-runtimes), ships its own node. update python.

stuff like wireshark and imhex remain vulnerable, even on their latest repo commits, which may or may not be spicy.

also Microsoft 365 Copilot still has its own unpatched brotlidec.dll from Oct 7, if anyone uses that. no fix available for that one afaik, not sure about how it can be made to access the vulnerable decoder.

why is this downvoted? are any of those not accurate?

Because a local software vuln is much less scary, less exploitable, and more common than an exploit like PHP2Shell, which requires basically no effort to exploit a large chunk of publicly exposed webservers. Basically, local vulns have been a thing forever and GP is off topic.

the article above is about a defect in google's brotli compression library (CVE-2026-111497). compression libraries don't really do web serving, or communicate with networked resources at all, they're hermetic. so exposure depends on the context this library is deployed in as a dependency.

put it in the network path, it can become an RCE.

put it in a privileged context, it can become privilege escalation.

put it in a hardened environment, it can become completely inert.

in no sane perspective is me listing off the applications shipping with vulnerable versions of this codec off-topic. just because the article is hellbent on portraying this as some sort of second php2shell, the actual underlying issue here is still CVE-2026-111497.

Well at least we know about it while or before the giant patch effort for everything else goes on. Just put it onto the pile.

Who turned on hard mode this week?

Nah man. We were on casual mode all along. This is the new normal.

> Installing the update isn't enough. A running process keeps the old decoder until it restarts, and a container keeps it until you rebuild the image on a patched base and redeploy

Claudeslop aside, it really is a whole new world we’re in now, where the audience of a run-of-the-mill RCE CVE announcement really does need this stated.

"In 2016, the Brotli algorithm shipped in Chrome, delivering overall better compression ratios for eligible resources."

"By the end of 2017, all modern browsers supported Brotli, and server support for it started to become more widespread."

For www users, all that data collection, surveillance and ad services traffic to enrich so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries, can make the www exceedingly slow

The way to "make the web faster" (or less inefficient) is to get rid of that needless traffic, and the ads it supports

SPDY,^1 HTTP/2 Server Push,^2 HTTP/3 QPACK,^3 brotli, .... make www users ("ad targets" to Google) uninformed, nonconsenting subjects in Google's failed experiments

The www already works just fine for its intended purpose (_not_ data collection, surveillance and ad services)

1. "As of 2021, no major browsers supported SPDY" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2_Server_Push

3. https://foxio.io/blog/header-accordions-qpack-amplification-...

I agree with you, but the immediate problem here seems to be that all major browsers support Brotli, and i think they all use the Google library, so they are all vulnerable.

Most of the discussion here is about vulnerabilities in servers, but it looks like its mostly a client problem.

Is there a way to turn brotli off?

Going back to your point, if we kept things simple we would be a lot more secure.

"OpenAI found this in February reported it as unauthenticated remote code execution that works in both directions, so a malicious client can take over an unpatched server and a malicious server can take over an unpatched client that accepts compressed responses."

Every user is different

For me I'm a text-only user not interested in graphics

I do not use a so-called "modern" browser to make HTTP requests

I don't request brotli-compressed content/resources^1

Normally I don't send an Accept-Encoding header

Almost always servers to which I connect^2 will return uncompressed text, which is what I want. No Accept-Encoding header needed

Occasionally servers will send gzip-compressed text by default and will ignore "Accept-Encoding: identity"

However the popular so-called "modern" browsers will send an Accept-Encoding header whose value includes brotli (br) by default

Unsuspecting www users are consequently opted in to Google's brotli experiment. Me, I opt out

1. I use a text-only browser (1.3MB static binary) to read HTML. I compile it without brotli support

2. Other users may connect to different servers. Preferences vary from user to user

I've just been pointing a Claude Code at these things as they pop up. A great time to not have to worry about chasing all these things manually.

Remember when the undici guys deprecated request.formData for _all_ serverside JS installs everywhere including bun, node, deno, because they felt it was unsafe? wonder how they're doing these days.

Wasn't that the correct decision? They put a deprecation warning on it to inform people it was unsafe in server context, while also keeping it.

It was unsafe and surprisingly easy to DOS servers using it incorrectly. And by "incorrectly", I mean how a lot of (most?) people used it with user data. An API that happens to be safe by accident when people use it should be deprecated.

Let’s say I have a node.js app behind an Amazon elastic load balancer which terminates TLS. My understanding is that in nearly all configurations, my app would be unaffected because the ELB would handle decompression. Is that generally correct?

Yep, I don't think too many people are exposing their python/node servers directly, it should be always behind a proxy or a fancy cloud LB.

Apache and nginx don't handle brotli out of the box.

Your two sentences basically contradict one another, no? Apache doesn't handle brotli, so it will pass the compressed body to the underlying server undecoded, which means the underlying server is effectively exposed to attacks on this bug, if it does brotli decode on the body.

I don’t know about that specific software, but I would be surprised if it decoded message bodies, which is entirely unrelated to TLS termination and shouldd be entirely unrelated to routing. So I would expect you would still be vulnerable.

An example of the cost of added complexity I suppose. Brotli is much more complicated than the gzip/deflate it replaces. ... and of course we still have to expose gzip to attack as well.

Every time you add something you lose something...

wtf Python is also effected. https://pypi.org/project/brotli/ not sure about shell

Side point from going to pypi:

> Security notice: Upgrade certifi, pip, and uv in response to CA certificate incident

Blimey PIP is affected? That's bad. I feel like that should have been bigger news?

Pretty sure that's the eMudhra "private key is 4" issue.

Because pip uses it's own certificate bundle, so even if you fix the system itself pip still needs its own upgrade to handle the eMudhra episode.

And strictly speaking you cannot trust the pip upgrade of pip with the vulnerable cert in the trust store due to certifi, which you also cannot upgrade safely with pip for the same reason. All of these are at one out of two compromises from being MITM'd during the upgrade.

So strictly we have to burn everything python to the ground and reinstall entirely.

Heh. This is part of why I always preferred getting my python runtime and all these core libs from my linux distro packager. But python die-hards look at me like I'm insane when I suggest this.

Even in today's LLM-addled world, I still think it's a better tradeoff for smaller system/site operators. Get the distro-level testing and regular auto-patching, rather than telling yourself it is a good idea to "freeze" your python world at the pace of your slowest app/system integrator.

It's the same reason I think docker is an anti-pattern for these small groups. You really cannot safely use these strategies to bake an image and divorce yourself from the maintained distro layer unless you are going to adopt CI/CD that does the same thing. Keep tracking all these patches to the entire runtime with all the dependencies, rebuild, re-test, and redeploy.

It's total cargo culting to adopt the freeze/image techniques and just abandon apps in place as if that is robust!

But, it's also more than just automatically updating everything. There is an editorial aspect to distro management to help secure the supply chain to your app. Most smaller orgs cannot feasibly do this as well as the regular linux distro maintainers. Some large orgs can probably do it better, but that doesn't matter if you aren't doing it large org style with dedicated security folks tracking all this against well-developed policies and procedures...

I agree about getting libs (binaries especially) from my distro, and it generally seems to be regarded as the "wrong thing to do". Freezing anything that might mean you get security updates slower seems to be a mistake to me.

> But python die-hards look at me like I'm insane when I suggest this.

They have a point. The distro is only carrying a small fraction of what's available on PyPI, and will have out-of-date versions that may lack security patches (and for projects like yt-dlp, are highly unlikely to work at all). Realistically they aren't applying security backports; there would rarely be a reason not to just use the new version, and the resources just aren't there for that scale of patching anyway.

Further, pip will interfere with your system package manager's tracking of the system environment (PEP 668), and any attempt you make to install from .deb/.rpm/etc. to a virtual environment is a hack at best. Maybe you could symlink individual package folders to the system environment while installing a superset, but ugh. Oh, and if you're a developer (like most "Python die-hards" are) then this isn't very helpful, as you aren't testing the installation of your package the way that your users will do it.

The mitigation is to ignore nearly all that stuff in PyPI, realizing it is barely a step up from copy-pasting out of stack overflow. Same goes for, e.g. python-whatever RPMs that look like they were drive-by contributions.

So your trusted base is the Python runtime and maybe a few choice libraries that actually have engaged package management. Sadly, it is a trap to think you can put things on the internet as a small player by leveraging lots of third-party stuff, when you don't have the resources to actually maintain that large dependency base.

This also may mean you want a base OS like Fedora and not some crusty "enterprise" variant that tries to bundle a frozen Python from 15 years ago. This is getting a little better in recent years, with some enterprise platforms having optional package streams for parallel install of newer runtime versions, etc.

Edit to add: on the Fedora-derived platforms, pip doesn't really interfere much anymore. The platform python-* RPMs go into /usr/lib/... while pip installs into /usr/local/lib/... or your ~/.local/lib/... hierarchy. The only mysterious behavior you get is if you manage to install in both places and then you have to understand the path search order. Just like if you do strange things with user and virtual environments.

Eh, it's a personal choice and a not unreasonable position to take, but there are a lot of things on PyPi that aren't packaged by e.g. Debian. Database clients, immensely popular frameworks, scientific computing libraries ...

Basically once you leave the realm of the 5-10 most popular building blocks in an area (which OS packagers do distribute), you're still left with plenty of packages that have 10ks+ of users, sane maintainer/security/ownership models, and code that would be very difficult to just copy-paste a la stackoverflow (e.g. native/compiled deps with complex wheel build tooling).

Yes, that's why I left wiggle room for a few choice packages you track yourself.

What isn't really tenable for a small team is to drag in scores to hundreds of different third-party packages and rely on them all when you have no staff allocated to really evaluate and monitor so much upstream stuff.

Or - you can just upgrade pip with a SHA hash pin, or set the magic env vars to use the system bundle.

You do need to be careful about creating new venvs with the old version of pip bundled in ensurepip in older Python releases. `uv` kindly patches that to newest pip, but not every Python binary does.

  python -m pip install "pip @ https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/3f/06/3e4420302363fbb71be3c7f35ce042f54bfca330e3e66b3a2e3c4cca579f/pip-26.2.2-py3-none-any.whl#sha256=fd7f4dfa8190e014013b9f08f3e973f4e4c26ffd179a204895533a7254813a70"

Or alternatively, on Debian with fixed system cert chain:

  PIP_USE_DEPRECATED=legacy-certs PIP_CERT=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt python -m pip install --upgrade "pip>=26.2.2"

https://discuss.python.org/t/avoiding-compromised-certificat...

Good to know. Does the first invocation recompute and check the hash of the wheel locally afterwards to ensure integrity?

Yep! I tested it with my own vibe-coded MITM proxy that hijacks pypi installations, which I created for ~$0.30 spend on DeepSeek API.

    $ python -m pip --no-cache install "pip @ https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/3f/06/3e4420302363fbb71be3c7f35ce042f54bfca330e3e66b3a2e3c4cca579f/pip-26.2.2-py3-none-any.whl#sha256=fd7f4dfa8190e014013b9f08f3e973f4e4c26ffd179a204895533a7254813a70"
    Collecting pip @ https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/3f/06/3e4420302363fbb71be3c7f35ce042f54bfca330e3e66b3a2e3c4cca579f/pip-26.2.2-py3-none-any.whl#sha256=fd7f4dfa8190e014013b9f08f3e973f4e4c26ffd179a204895533a7254813a70
      Downloading pip-26.2.2-py3-none-any.whl (1.8 MB)
         ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 1.8/1.8 MB 570.0 MB/s  0:00:00
    ERROR: THESE PACKAGES DO NOT MATCH THE HASHES FROM THE REQUIREMENTS FILE. If you have updated the package versions, please update the hashes. Otherwise, examine the package contents carefully; someone may have tampered with them.
        pip @ https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/3f/06/3e4420302363fbb71be3c7f35ce042f54bfca330e3e66b3a2e3c4cca579f/pip-26.2.2-py3-none-any.whl#sha256=fd7f4dfa8190e014013b9f08f3e973f4e4c26ffd179a204895533a7254813a70 from https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/3f/06/3e4420302363fbb71be3c7f35ce042f54bfca330e3e66b3a2e3c4cca579f/pip-26.2.2-py3-none-any.whl#sha256=fd7f4dfa8190e014013b9f08f3e973f4e4c26ffd179a204895533a7254813a70:
            Expected sha256 fd7f4dfa8190e014013b9f08f3e973f4e4c26ffd179a204895533a7254813a70
                 Got        8c448177668e735cdde7d6178694b90c084ba18559348cc394c4b1546eeec89c

The second one works too:

    $ PIP_USE_DEPRECATED=legacy-certs PIP_CERT=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt python -m pip install --no-cache --upgrade "pip>=26.2.2"
    WARNING: Retrying (Retry(total=4, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by 'SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1082)'))': /simple/pip/
    WARNING: Retrying (Retry(total=3, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by 'SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1082)'))': /simple/pip/
    WARNING: Retrying (Retry(total=2, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by 'SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1082)'))': /simple/pip/
    WARNING: Retrying (Retry(total=1, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by 'SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1082)'))': /simple/pip/
    WARNING: Retrying (Retry(total=0, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by 'SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1082)'))': /simple/pip/
    Could not fetch URL https://pypi.org/simple/pip/: There was a problem confirming the ssl certificate: [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1082) - skipping
    ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement pip>=26.2.2 (from versions: none)
    ERROR: No matching distribution found for pip>=26.2.2

As compared with a naive installation through the proxy:

    $ python -m pip --no-cache install 'pip>=26.2.2'
    Collecting pip>=26.2.2
      Downloading pip-26.2.2-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (4.6 kB)
    Downloading pip-26.2.2-py3-none-any.whl (1.8 MB)
       ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 1.8/1.8 MB 775.3 MB/s  0:00:00
    Installing collected packages: pip
      Attempting uninstall: pip
        Found existing installation: pip 26.2.1
        Uninstalling pip-26.2.1:
          Successfully uninstalled pip-26.2.1
    Successfully installed pip-26.2.2

    $ cat venv/lib/python3.14/site-packages/sni_proxy_sentinel.txt
    SNI proxy lab sentinel. This file is inert.

Oh nice. Then I have to thank you for a possible non-horrible upgrade path. If you were close by, I'd invite you for some icecream or a round of pool :)

It's safe to upgrade with python 3.12.16 now:

  # docker run --rm --net=host --add-host=pypi.org:127.0.0.1 --add-host=files.pythonhosted.org:127.0.0.1 python:3.12.16-slim-trixie pip install six
  WARNING: Retrying (Retry(total=4, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by 'SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: certificate rejected (_ssl.c:1011)'))': /simple/six/

Yep. Per the main thread on the Python forums (https://discuss.python.org/t/information-for-python-users-re...), this now happens even with the outdated pip because the built-in `ssl` module has been patched to reject it. The relevant commit is https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/7dd8b4736a1419750b9... , featuring a rather amusing workaround for security scanners that might mistake the blacklisted certificates (included for testing purposes) for "leaked" certificates accidentally included in a source package.

From code comments, because I found it interesting:

  * This is an extraordinary measure and last line of defense.  Removing trust is
  * primarily the job of the platform root store. This list only blocks keys while
  * that update is still propagating to the OS, container images, or root CAs
  * bundled in Python packages.  The threshold for adding an entry is very high.
  *
  * See https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/160040 for the eMudhra discussion.

As a Mint 22.x user, I wonder if and when Debian or Ubuntu will pick up the change and release another patch for the system Python (basically, to my understanding, a base of 3.12.3 with security patches from other patch releases backported). Since they've already updated ca-certificates it might not seem necessary, at least as long as the pip package gets updated (although I don't use that anyway).

BTW, I think I saw your comments in other places about the 30-cent vibe-coded MITM demo proxy, unless someone else had the same idea. Thanks for helping educate.

Edit: apparently (https://discuss.python.org/t/avoiding-compromised-certificat...), the relevant Debian and Ubuntu packages already patch the distro-provided pip to enforce using the system certificates. (Indeed, `ca-certificates` is listed as "Depends" for the pip package, rather than "Recommends".) But maybe they'll still be interested in the key blocking, on defense-in-depth principles.

I had a pretty fun time with it myself. Rather than a system package for pip, or the `ensurepip`-provided one, I've been using the copy managed by pipx. I had to:

* Update system certificates

* Locate that pip and directly invoke it to self-update with hash pinning, rather than going through pipx

* Fix a few stray venvs that contained their own pip

* Use the fixed pipx to update uv (although I guess the uv self-update should work even for a pipx-installed copy?)

The legacy-certs hint is neat. I did it the first way but would rather not have since I'm on Mint.

> All of these are at one out of two compromises from being MITM'd during the upgrade.

This is not true; pip supports hash pinning, so an attacker would have to be able to defeat SHA256 as well (or compromise both the official Python discussion forum and PyPI itself, so as to forged the published hash). Other hashes can also be used. Instructions are provided on the Python discussion forum to self-upgrade pip with hash pinning: https://discuss.python.org/t/information-for-python-users-re...

Python certificate handling is a hot mess, even by Python standards.

Commentary like this adds nothing to the discussion and is simply provocative. Please don't.

Provocative of what? Thinking about the issues that Python has? Why would that be a problem?

It IS a mess and it's causing problems again and again in real life. And it is particularly bad with Python. I don't see why this should not be pointed out.

~~Recent versions of pip use `truststore` by default to access the system's certificates, only relying on the vendored `certifi` as a fallback or if explicitly directed.~~

The above is incorrect per the Python forum discussion (https://discuss.python.org/t/information-for-python-users-re...). Pip will trust certificates from both sources.

Users of uv who have already updated their system certificates can use:

  UV_SYSTEM_CERTS=true uv self update

IMO this should be Brotli2Shell if anything

Ubuntu still has libbrotli1 patch under review as medium. This is holding up updates to libcurl and thus git and a whole bunch of other stuff.

They’ll have it for few months and then make you pay to get the update.

I had to check all of our Python deployments and installation BOMs and was quite relieved - turns out that none actually installed brotli libraries. HTTP libraries like httpx, requests and frameworks consider them optional and autodetect their presence.

...which points to an area where Python has a significant drawback: optional/accelerator dependencies are loaded via try/except-ImportError. That's suboptimal for a bunch of reasons:

- If a vulnerable dependency is in your environment as a transitive of something that's not at risk (e.g. code you don't use, code that doesn't talk to untrusted sites), code that shouldn't use it will pick up that transitive.

- Autodetection of optional stuff is often silent. E.g. libxml vs. pure-python XML parsing doesn't really act any different at load time or most of runtime, besides being faster, so it's non-obvious what's being used when.

- Probing for packages that aren't listed as a concrete dependency by importable name risks loading unintended code due to name conflicts (malicious, or accidental/caused by local files with the same name or weird PYTHONPATH).

- There are plenty of ways to get an ImportError after running a lot of Python code in a dependency before giving up! That code might mutate global state/change behavior, or do insecure things, etc. Malicious actors could take advantage of ImportError being raiseable by user code to conceal naughty behavior at import time.

I really want Python to come up with a saner way to concretely identify (avoiding name conflicts) and probe for optional dependencies at import time. try/except-ImportError ain't it.

This is yet another example of the incredible negative impact of Google’s pattern of crapping out open-source libraries without actually maintaining them, so that people just copy and paste them into their projects.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50216791

Why a name that says nothing about the affected software?

Is enabling Brotli a worthwhile performance improvement for, say, wordpress site?

Is there a fix already in node so I can start updating?

As I've mentioned numerous times at this point, relying on third party code is a massive liability (supply chain attacks/sloppy code). My hand rolled brotli implementation is not only faster than libbrotli but also immune to this vulnerability (yes, I checked). Roll your own code people.

Would you also apply this to cryptography or, well, really any security library? Because I hope the answer will be no...

Please feel free to publish and/or link to your alternative implementation. Many eyes can help with identifying security/functionality issues, and if your implementation proves superior to libbrotli in general, this area of the ecosystem is in dire need of diversity.

You wouldn't know this implementation, she's from Canada

Anyone know if there’s a Java decoder?

Pretty much everything that talks http has this Brotli library linked in. A quick file search on a Windows dev box showed:

- git

- Sublime text

- VS studio

- CUDA

- .NET

- inkscape

- AzureTools

Honestly it's time to get rid of C as a language used where security is a factor. Enough already. Why the hell is a lib like brotli that processes public general internet traffic, and maintained by google, not in rust?

Because these applications were created long before Rust existed.

There is a cost to conversion.

Brotil was actually created post rust, but before rust took off.

It's not even an application it's a compression library

Rust-Brotli (by Dropbox) is actually a drop-in replacement for the Brotli C lib: https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli#:~:text=rust-brotli%2...

Dropbox switched to it a decade ago, so it's probably quite product-ready.

Check Librsvg, or php-rust. Or tons of gtk4-rs software doing it just fine.

Security is a factor everywhere. And C is everywhere. There's not going to be a "rewrite everything in Rust" project until after there is some legit penalty for selling / offering software in C that could be more secure in another language.

I think Mozilla got it right when they abandoned the effort to rewrite the entire browser in Rust and instead focused on analysis of which modules needed priority rewrites. If a module has historically had zero memory-related bugs, then there are other higher priority things to spend time on.

That said, Google Project Zero should have had Brotli on their radar. Hopefully they still have people and resources.

Asterinax. RustPyhon. PHP 8.5 rewrite in Rust. FFMPEG and Qemu might follow soon. It's inevitable.

I’ll point out that Servo was always a research project — any thought of it replacing Gecko was an incredibly long-term stretch goal. It was _a lot_ more interested in “can we write a high-performance browser engine in Rust” (there’s a reason why it significantly predates Rust 1.0 — they were very much developed together!) and “can we implement parallelism in places where browsers historically have not” (because you have more guarantees of safety).

Chromium _has_ been replacing certain components with ones in safe languages, and it seems like that will continue slowly (with integrating them into the existing codebase, with web compatibility risk of any changes in behaviour, with the risk of performance and power regressions).

I can understand why people used a C library for these apps, as when HTTP2 was specified, the C lib was the only game in down.

However, why not switch to the Rust lib when it was available? I suppose people at Dropbox are now pretty happy they did in 2016: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/lossless-compression-wit...

It's slower, though. Too high a price to pay for safety it seems.

Sorry, I find the supply chain risks of Rust much more worrying than these memory safety issues. So how about we get rid of Rust? At least cargo is a problem.

Cool. C is going to become that cool forgotten forbidden programming language.

So, uh, isn’t the blast radius huge here? Like ticking time bomb for unpatched servers huge once someone figures out how to craft their br payload just right?

Browsers were patched back in March, but if you can get anything else that is unpatched to decode br, and most HTTP clients do by default, and you’ve figured out the right payload (yes not easy, but still), isn’t this, well, really bad? Like Heartbleed big?

I really don't understand how so many different things are affected by the same brotli bug/exploit.

I even read the patch for the C code (patch which, btw, seems a bit hacky to me with isSafe? methods added and whatnots but YMMV: now I understand things had to be patched in a hurry but this patch really looks like "lipstick on a buffer overflowing C pig" to me).

What's the link between Python / Node / C++ / libbrotli / Envoy / Bun: are those some all using the same C brotli encoder/decoder?

Can someone who knows more explain why all those are vulnerable?

> As for unaffected software, Apache’s standard mod_brotli does not decode Brotli

Because this one only encodes and doesn't decode and the bug is in the decoder? (for I take it mod_brotli, with such a name, still does something brotli related and isn't, say, a TOTP token generator nor a SAT solver?).

I mean overall, sheesh: could we get better explanation / better writeups when such big fuckups happen?

Yes. All these language runtimes compile against common libraries. Compression libs are one of the most common common libraries that platforms like node, ruby, dotnet, python, and etc need to compile.

Google provides the Brotli implementation. Package maintainers slurp that up and create ie libbrotli-dev. When you compile node it uses that for brotli support.

Brotli was a library released by the Google team that developed it. There weren't lots of independent implementations; they were all from the same source code.

Or you can roll your own and not rely on the literal disaster that Google developed. Brotli is trivial to implement.

Well did you?

Your comment is irrelevant to mine. I stated what is, while you stated what ought to be.

It's trivial to make any open source repo that nobody uses. It's hard to get people to adopt your library over one supported by one of the world's largest companies.

How may web servers only serve brotli?

How many clients only accept brotli?

Well it's negotiated, right?

So say you run a SaaS that allows for something like letting people set their Avatar from an image URL which gets downloaded.

As an attacker I setup a new server that serves only brotli and then submit that URL to the SaaS.

> So say you run a SaaS that allows for something like letting people set their Avatar from an image URL which gets downloaded.

That's a clever example, but why would you do that? The avatar should be a static resource. As such, I'd only provide an upload file dialog.

Gravitar was super popular for a year or two.

Quit being overly pedantic about how contrived the example is and struggle with the underlying fact that the compression type is negotiated between the client and server. If the compression happens on the HTTP request (as some of the comments here suggest), then the server must use that compression method or it fails to read the body of the request.

> how contrived the example is

That's basically one of the core ingredients of security. Build a threat model.

Lots of apps will, for example, bring in your Google avatar (i.e. they fetch its URL for ingestion) as a default avatar if you use them for SSO. Slack included, IIRC.

I can almost certainly make my browser submit its file upload POST with the compression of my choice and your server will accept it.

apache does not accept brotli by default. so while the first part is true, the second part is only true for some X% of websites.

Just send a POST with Content-Encoding:br to any URL and hope it gets decided before the URL route is checked.

There’s both request compression (no negotiation) and response compression (negotiated).

Ah yes, domain registered, logo made.

Real carreer starter.

Well, whoever picked the name HTTP2Shell certainly didn't use any intelligence, artificial or genuine.

It's so meaningless, broad and undescriptive of the actual issue. No it probably doesn't affect an HTTP server with nothing else behind it, so why is HTTP being blasted?

You might as well call it Exploit Pro Max...

Feels like the goal was sensationalism.

Something that OpenAI would coin. Just like Anthropic did with Mythos.

The author clearly used super intelligence.

You and I, my friend, are the only ones in this thread not being sent to work in the glitter mines of south Arkansas as enemies of God's Country. SI has the best names, other intelligence is vastly inferior, using it is worse than many schisms of -isms combined.

I immediately thought HTTP/2 was having a bad day somehow. Might I suggest Software2Shell to be less confusing.

Specifically Brotli2Shell

google2shell would have been nice :D

Alt-tabbing from browser to terminal and back has always felt exhausting. Nice.

With ad served malware, this wouldn't be the first time though :)

All these names are silly. It's just marketing.

There are levels of silliness, and this has achieved a new one.

Actually it does, if the server is willing to decompress POST bodies.

Brotli bodies, so Brotli2Shell

And only those using Google's Brotli implementation.

What are the other implementations?

I think we've all seen where an LLM names a session, issue, or PR based on its early understanding and fails update it later.

AI isn't being asked to review the title, and it doesn't have experience or think, so of course it's not going to flag it.

No human reviews anything anymore so of course they aren't going to catch it.

Edit: AI for as good as it is at "writing" is terrible at writing and particularly at naming things. I had an AI name a client OpenAICompatibleEmbeddingClient. "Brooooo.. I think "compatible" is implied, who names stuff like that?!"

LLM-based AI is a synthesis of human observed behavior

But does it bring synergy with our current paradigm?

Descriptive type names are a good thing. Id argue that one isnt that bad, but llms do take it to another level sometimes.

That means that it supports other services with OpenAI-compatible embeddings APIs (not just OpenAI's own API). Seems reasonable!

Fortunately I didn't ask it for excuses and so it didn't give them like a pedantic junior on the spectrum.

Which they will happily do if you ask them "why" they did something. 100% they will give their best "well actually" impression.

`OpenAICompatible` is also a widely used phrasal description of a part/version of the OpenAI API that is supported by quite a lot of endpoints.

- https://lmstudio.ai/docs/developer/openai-compat

I've seen that used as a description for 2years or so.

Just call it CVE-2026-111497. More accurate and much easier to remember and to talk about with your boss.

Or EUVD-2026-108169.

I can maybe remember CVE-2026. But there is no way I can remember 6 random digits.

Yeah, because the six number chunk is near the limit of recall. Don't remember CVE-2026 since the year and CVE can be reconstructed from time memory. You know it came up this year. Remember that vuln 111-497 (as two chunks) came out this year, and remembering two short chunks is easier.

I don’t know why you’d want to remember the number, but this one seems easy if you know some memory techniques.

> Remember that vuln 111-497 (as two chunks)

Good first step. Remember it’s two sets of three numbers. The first set is all ones, meaning the first three numbers are 1, then the fourth number is 4, then you add five for the next one (9), then you have to remember to subtract two (7)¹.

May sound silly, but I bet some of you have already memorised it from that alone. Being a slightly convoluted by still logical set-by-step helps with recollection.

¹ Lot of different ways to go about that, like remembering that the first set was three of one so “two was left out”.

Fun fact: not even Google can remember that number on the first try, apparently:

https://github.com/google/brotli/issues/1597

It looks like marketing HTTP2Shell seems to appeal to everyone that uses HTTP, while Brotli2Shell might not wake up people that know what it is.

Now, whether it's warranted or not, that's another matter, but they know how to appeal for maximum awareness/interaction.

> while Brotli2Shell might not wake up people that know what it is.

And, most of all, is damaging to Google, which are the master of software engineering. /s

A better name is Konduktsemmel, which is a bread roll (Semmel) which you eat on a funeral (Kondukt) in Austria. Fits to Brotli, doesn't it?

(Actually you eat cake and drink coffee on a funeral, but it's still called like that in some parts of Austria.)

A better name is Fred, because

Should have definitely been Brotli2Shell, but Google ingeniously managed to dodge that bullet by having NodeJS come out with a fix before they did (others might call that accidental exposure), and then barely communicating about that with the broader community once they finally did. Here's a timeline of events[0] and here's me more broadly complaining about Google's stance[1]

[0] https://www.bugsink.com/blog/http2shell-timeline/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50230362

Bro2Shell sounds better though

It will never not amuse me that Mozilla changed the Brotli extension to avoid this very connotation

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559#c147

I mean...who cares? It's actually kind of strange that your comment got others talking about AI naming things.

SQL Slammer didn't actually slam anything, and applied to a single vendor among many SQL providers. Heartbleed didn't make anyone's heart bleed...I mean, at least directly. Shellshock only impacted a single shell environment, again among many. Log4Shell impacted a single logging implementation, among many. Spectre and Meltdown...I mean, who would think that related to CPU cache side channels?

These are just dumb names for people to share in referring to something. Seems silly and like a waste of time to spend effort getting upset about them.

Why do critical vulnerabilities get a cutesy name and website nowadays? Who’s paying for these sites?

Are you asking why do we name things? In a programming forum?

Listen. There are TWO problems, okay‽

Wasn't it three?

Last I heard it was 10 or 11 but definitely not 0x3.

I'm certainly not complaining about some selfless guy making a helpful website without expecting anything in return!

They excpect fame and may make things look worse than they are

How, exactly, are they making "things look worse than they are"? By.... showing what the issue is?

Not particularly referencing to this link, but usually severity is made more severe than it actually is. One kind of sensationalism is usually used.

No, they aren't. The website doesn't list an author, so fame is out of the question, and they say exactly how severe the bug is rated ("Rated 9.2 Critical (CVSS 4.0) by GitHub, High by Node.js.") right at the top.

There is named entity in the end, and "we" statement. But yeah, I was speaking in general, not so specifically about this page. It is better than most who do this.

Small static websites are effectively free (Cloudflare, GCP free tier, etc)..

Domains aren’t

Sure, but domains aren't going to be more than $10 or $20 for the year they're relevant.

\o/

1. See a vuln domain reported, clone the site. 2. Wait for it to expire and snag it. 3. Republish the site with malware 4. Watch people dither about domain names and stuff instead of taking time to fix things.

Sure they are. The domain you want isn't.

GitHub.io domains, workers.dev domains, etc are all free domains.

Clever use and abuse of some startups can get you a free domain with a signup package that you can subsequently transfer out, but those are harder to find these days.

Seriously, the bad guys figure this out all the time.

Most domains are only like ~$10/year. I already have a handful registered for potential project ideas because they're borderline free, for major vulnerabilities I would do the same.

It is annoying (and ironic) because larger companies, that will benefit from this information the most, blocks newly registered domains.

Yep, this website was blocked at my work all day yesterday despite me submitting it for review.

Protip, use the Wayback Machine as a proxy to get around firewalls if you only need to view content from a static site.

My work blocks every commercial AI service, but I just want to read the static blogs and benchmarks from the large labs to keep up with recent news and developments in the space and the Wayback Machine trick works perfectly for that.

This has been the case for more than a decade, Heartbleed was probably the one which really created the trend.

You remember CVEs by heart? Do you even bother using DNS?

The same reason we name storms and hurricanes... It's easier to raise awareness, and refer to these things after the fact. More memorable then CVE-whatever.

I find it helpful at least...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50220841.

Why are we still so reliant on HTTP? HTTP came out in 1990 (36 years ago) and the most common version of HTTP still in use, 1.1 (RFC2616), came out in 1999 (27 years ago)?

Yes, I know HTTP 2 and 3 and SSE are attempts to make it faster and more parallel, but its still slow. Its slow because its unidirectional with a full round trip and by default its a new socket per each message. Yes, I know the real reason HTTP became and remains popular is because its sessionless... in theory. Still, there are better options available. You can do so much more with a full duplex channel.

We don't need new versions of http or SMTP because they're already simple and great and they're dumb protocols so there's not much you could ever add

If you want something else you can take your pick based on need from dozens of other options

HTTP 1 is full of parser differential vulnerabilities, which 2 fixes. That is probably its biggest flaw.

SMTP is too chatty - it uses too many round trips for efficient transfer across the internet. It can take several seconds just to get to the point of sending the email data. It also duplicates information between the SMTP envelope and the email body which creates vulnerabilities when they don't match.

For APIs that don't have to work in a browser I suggest JSON lines over TCP, or over TLS.

Most header parsing bugs that affect HTTP1.1 can also affect 2+3. Not in the same style but there are quite a few overlapping ones.

Only when 2/3 translates to 1, as in request smuggling attacks at a reverse proxy.

Header parsing, sure. But message framing bugs are much more likely with HTTP/1.1.

Agreed. The issue with all these archaic standards is that they were rolled decades ago back when certain practices were either outright not being employed OR that hardware wasn't fast enough. Ironically, HTTP itself is a literal nightmare to parse (performance wise) on top of having like... ten? distinct vulnerability classes. The world desperately needs new standards.

Just open a TCP socket and send JSON messages. Or if you want a bit more efficiency, fixed-format binary messages, but remember to include a version number.

For custom server implementations, agreed. But the web still depends on HTTP and we sadly need the major infra providers to agree on a new standard otherwise HTTP isn't going anywhere

Web uses web protocols, notweb uses notweb protocols. When I write an XMPP bot it has to speak XMPP, not HTTP. I could write my video game server to use XMPP but why the heck would I do that? If I choose a badly fitting protocol, it's on me.

I think one problem there is that a lot of places block other ports. Was that not why websockets runs on http ports?

Websockets have to be careful not to enable a client-side SSRF by accessing anything you couldn't already access with an <img> tag. They can use any port except the ones that are generally prohibited for browser HTTP requests, such as 25 and 6667.

"by default its a new socket for each message" is misinformation - keepalive is the default since HTTP 1.1 (1999).

Keep alive is not default behavior, so my prior comment was still more correct.

All webservers (apache, nginx, litespeed, caddy) have keep-alive enabled by default. All browsers also support it. Whether it's actually used/negotiated on most connections, I don't know, and if you want to be pedantic you're right that it can't be default by definition since you need the header to use it. But I suspect it actually is used for most connections nowadays.

Multiplexing is the default in HTTP/2 and 3. So you're still wrong.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36517829/what-does-multi...

So, for the sake of argument let’s say I am completely wrong, MDN is wrong, all of Stack Overflow is also wrong. Even still HTTP is slow. Slow as shit. Imagine trying to do a MS Teams call with 50+ participants with cameras on. It would be slow as shit for just a one-on-one call. A call with 50+ people would be ridiculously slower and would likely result in a crash from memory exhaustion.

I was also not talking about HTTP2 or 3. I was very clear about that. Reading is hard. HTTP is used in many different contexts outside the browser where 1.1 continues to dominate.

The primary reason developers want to keep HTTP around is familiarity and comfort. HTTP is great when you don’t compare to anything else or do any kind of performance tuning.

Keepalive is literally the default. You have to send an additional header if you don't want to use keepalive.

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