HTTP/2 Rapid Reset (CVE-2023-44487) highlights a web-scale protocol abuse pattern for DDoS
Cloudflare documented a record-scale DDoS wave that abused HTTP/2 stream cancellation (RST_STREAM) to generate extreme request rates with a relatively small botnet. The “Rapid Reset” technique (tracked as CVE-2023-44487) exploits HTTP/2’s ability to open many concurrent streams and then instantly cancel them, letting attackers recycle concurrency slots faster than some servers and intermediaries can clean up state. Cloudflare said attacks began Aug. 25, 2023 and peaked just above 201 million requests per second, observed alongside similar activity reported by Google and AWS, prompting coordinated disclosure to vendors and critical infrastructure providers. Read more