CVE-2025-4821: high-severity vulnerability in Cloudflare quiche
Incorrect congestion window growth by invalid ACK ranges
Published
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21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.5epss 1.0%
Impact
Cloudflare quiche was discovered to be vulnerable to incorrect congestion window growth, which could cause it to send data at a rate faster than the path might actually support.
An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit the vulnerability by first completing a handshake and initiating a congestion-controlled data transfer towards itself. Then, it could manipulate the victim's congestion control state by sending ACK frames covering a large range of packet numbers (including packet numbers that had never been sent); see RFC 9000 Section 19.3. The victim could grow the congestion window beyond typical expectations and allow more bytes in flight than the path might really support. In extreme cases, the window might grow beyond the limit of the internal variable's type, leading to an overflow panic.
Patches
quiche 0.24.4 is the earliest version containing the fix for this issue.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
Cloudflare · quicheRelated CVEs — Cloudflare quiche
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2024-1765MEDIUMUnlimited resource allocation by QUIC CRYPTO frames flooding in quicheEPSS 1.1%CVE-2025-4820MEDIUMIncorrect congestion window growth by optimistic ACKEPSS 0.9%CVE-2023-6193MEDIUMUnbounded queuing of path validation messages in cloudflare-quicheEPSS 0.8%CVE-2024-1410LOWUnbounded storage of information related to connection ID retirement, in quiche EPSS 0.7%CVE-2026-12523HIGHResource exhaustion in quiche HTTP/3 and QPACK layersEPSS 0.5%CVE-2025-7054HIGHInfinite loop triggered by connection ID retirementEPSS 0.5%