NIOHTTP1 and projects using it for generating HTTP responses can be subject to a HTTP Response Injection attack. This occurs when a HTTP/1.1 server accepts user generated input from an incoming request and reflects it into a HTTP/1.1 response header in some form. A malicious user can add newlines to their input (usually in encoded form) and "inject" those newlines into the returned HTTP response. This capability allows users to work around security headers and HTTP/1.1 framing headers by injecting entirely false responses or other new headers. The injected false responses may also be treated as the response to subsequent requests, which can lead to XSS, cache poisoning, and a number of other flaws. This issue was resolved by adding validation to the HTTPHeaders type, ensuring that there's no whitespace incorrectly present in the HTTP headers provided by users. As the existing API surface is non-failable, all invalid characters are replaced by linear whitespace.

Some HTTP/2 implementations are vulnerable to a flood of empty frames, potentially leading to a denial of service. The attacker sends a stream of frames with an empty payload and without the end-of-stream flag. These frames can be DATA, HEADERS, CONTINUATION and/or PUSH_PROMISE. The peer spends time processing each frame disproportionate to attack bandwidth. This can consume excess CPU.

Some HTTP/2 implementations are vulnerable to unconstrained interal data buffering, potentially leading to a denial of service. The attacker opens the HTTP/2 window so the peer can send without constraint; however, they leave the TCP window closed so the peer cannot actually write (many of) the bytes on the wire. The attacker then sends a stream of requests for a large response object. Depending on how the servers queue the responses, this can consume excess memory, CPU, or both.

Some HTTP/2 implementations are vulnerable to a header leak, potentially leading to a denial of service. The attacker sends a stream of headers with a 0-length header name and 0-length header value, optionally Huffman encoded into 1-byte or greater headers. Some implementations allocate memory for these headers and keep the allocation alive until the session dies. This can consume excess memory.

Some HTTP/2 implementations are vulnerable to a settings flood, potentially leading to a denial of service. The attacker sends a stream of SETTINGS frames to the peer. Since the RFC requires that the peer reply with one acknowledgement per SETTINGS frame, an empty SETTINGS frame is almost equivalent in behavior to a ping. Depending on how efficiently this data is queued, this can consume excess CPU, memory, or both.

Some HTTP/2 implementations are vulnerable to a reset flood, potentially leading to a denial of service. The attacker opens a number of streams and sends an invalid request over each stream that should solicit a stream of RST_STREAM frames from the peer. Depending on how the peer queues the RST_STREAM frames, this can consume excess memory, CPU, or both.

Some HTTP/2 implementations are vulnerable to resource loops, potentially leading to a denial of service. The attacker creates multiple request streams and continually shuffles the priority of the streams in a way that causes substantial churn to the priority tree. This can consume excess CPU.

Some HTTP/2 implementations are vulnerable to ping floods, potentially leading to a denial of service. The attacker sends continual pings to an HTTP/2 peer, causing the peer to build an internal queue of responses. Depending on how efficiently this data is queued, this can consume excess CPU, memory, or both.

Some HTTP/2 implementations are vulnerable to window size manipulation and stream prioritization manipulation, potentially leading to a denial of service. The attacker requests a large amount of data from a specified resource over multiple streams. They manipulate window size and stream priority to force the server to queue the data in 1-byte chunks. Depending on how efficiently this data is queued, this can consume excess CPU, memory, or both.

In SwiftNIO before 1.8.0, a buffer overflow was addressed with improved size validation.