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.
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 The distro is only carrying a small fraction of what's available on PyPI, and will have out-of-date versions that may lack security patches (and for projects like yt-dlp, are highly unlikely to work at all).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.
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 ...
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 :)
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.
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...
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 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.
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 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.
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”.
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]
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
An example of the cost of added complexity I suppose. Brotli is much more complicated than the gzip/deflate it replaced. ... and of course we still have to expose gzip to attack as well.
Every time you add something you lose something...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So if I'm understanding the report correctly, it was fixed in FF 150?
The "affected code" seems to have very little overlap with the code actually altered by the patch, though.
Also, I noticed a comment:
> 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
Wouldn't that imply Google did know it was a vulnerability all that time? Or is chromium not talking to Chrome?
[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
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.)
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)
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.
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.
And yet the answer you seem to think it is is not the correct one. "php2shell" and "http2shell" are named that way for marketing. They commissioned a fucking webcomic for php2shell, FFS. OpenAI and the security firms that use their models are doing everything they can to hype up these exploits and make them as marketable as they can, which is pretty fucking gross.
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.
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.
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.
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.
hey guys, fyi: git for windows is vulnerable even in its latest release, careful pulling repos over https from random ass servers (prolly uncommon but hey)
also affects codex (gui), which ships its own git, could be more of a problem there, when the LLMs get quirky at night.
speaking of, update codex (and wipe its cache at ~/.cache/codex-runtimes), ships its own node. update python.
also Microsoft 365 Copilot still has its own unpatched brotlidec.dll from Oct 7, if anyone uses that. no fix available for that one, not sure about how it can be made to access the vulnerable decoder.
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.
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 be completely inert.
in no sane perspective is me listing off the applications shipping with vulnerable versions of this codec off-topic. i'm sorry if what i posted didn't entertain you sufficiently enough like php2shell may have, but not entertaining is not the same as off-topic. just because the article is hellbent on portraying this as some sort of second php2shell, i'm not obligated to focus on that framing only. the actual underlying issue here is still CVE-2026-111497.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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 guinea pigs in Google's failed "improvements"
The www already works just fine for what its intended purpose (_not_ data collection, surveillance and ad services)
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
185 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 15.6 ms ] thread> 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?
So strictly we have to burn everything python to the ground and reinstall entirely.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Or alternatively, on Debian with fixed system cert chain: https://discuss.python.org/t/avoiding-compromised-certificat...From code comments, because I found it interesting:
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.
* 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.
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...
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 be pointed out.
Who turned on hard mode this week?
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...
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.
- https://lmstudio.ai/docs/developer/openai-compat
I've seen that used as a description for 2years or so.
> 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”.
https://github.com/google/brotli/issues/1597
Now, whether it's warranted or not, that's another matter, but they know how to appeal for maximum awareness/interaction.
And, most of all, is damaging to Google, which are the master of software engineering. /s
[0] https://www.bugsink.com/blog/http2shell-timeline/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50230362
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559#c147
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2029458
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.
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.
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.
Every time you add something you lose something...
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
The "affected code" seems to have very little overlap with the code actually altered by the patch, though.
Also, I noticed a comment:
> 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
Wouldn't that imply Google did know it was a vulnerability all that time? Or is chromium not talking to Chrome?
> 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.)
https://www.bugsink.com/blog/http2shell-timeline/
https://www.bugsink.com/blog/bye-bye-brotli/
and they cover the timeline better than I do.
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)
How many clients only accept brotli?
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.
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.
I find it helpful at least...
also affects codex (gui), which ships its own git, could be more of a problem there, when the LLMs get quirky at night.
speaking of, update codex (and wipe its cache at ~/.cache/codex-runtimes), ships its own node. update python.
also Microsoft 365 Copilot still has its own unpatched brotlidec.dll from Oct 7, if anyone uses that. no fix available for that one, not sure about how it can be made to access the vulnerable decoder.
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 be completely inert.
in no sane perspective is me listing off the applications shipping with vulnerable versions of this codec off-topic. i'm sorry if what i posted didn't entertain you sufficiently enough like php2shell may have, but not entertaining is not the same as off-topic. just because the article is hellbent on portraying this as some sort of second php2shell, i'm not obligated to focus on that framing only. the actual underlying issue here is still CVE-2026-111497.
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.
Multiplexing is the default in HTTP/2 and 3. So you're still wrong.
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.
Apache and nginx don't handle brotli out of the box.
- 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.
"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 guinea pigs in Google's failed "improvements"
The www already works just fine for what 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-...
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.
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