CVE-2025-66471

Publication date 8 December 2025

Last updated 9 December 2025


Ubuntu priority

Description

urllib3 is a user-friendly HTTP client library for Python. Starting in version 1.0 and prior to 2.6.0, the Streaming API improperly handles highly compressed data. urllib3's streaming API is designed for the efficient handling of large HTTP responses by reading the content in chunks, rather than loading the entire response body into memory at once. When streaming a compressed response, urllib3 can perform decoding or decompression based on the HTTP Content-Encoding header (e.g., gzip, deflate, br, or zstd). The library must read compressed data from the network and decompress it until the requested chunk size is met. Any resulting decompressed data that exceeds the requested amount is held in an internal buffer for the next read operation. The decompression logic could cause urllib3 to fully decode a small amount of highly compressed data in a single operation. This can result in excessive resource consumption (high CPU usage and massive memory allocation for the decompressed data.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Package Ubuntu Release Status
python-urllib3 25.10 questing
Needs evaluation
25.04 plucky
Needs evaluation
24.04 LTS noble
Needs evaluation
22.04 LTS jammy
Needs evaluation
20.04 LTS focal
Needs evaluation
18.04 LTS bionic
Needs evaluation
16.04 LTS xenial
Needs evaluation
14.04 LTS trusty
Needs evaluation
python-pip 25.10 questing
Needs evaluation
25.04 plucky
Needs evaluation
24.04 LTS noble
Needs evaluation
22.04 LTS jammy
Needs evaluation
20.04 LTS focal
Needs evaluation
18.04 LTS bionic
Needs evaluation
16.04 LTS xenial
Needs evaluation
14.04 LTS trusty
Needs evaluation

Notes


mdeslaur

On focal and earlier, the python-pip package bundles python-urllib3 binaries when built. After updating python-urllib3, a no-change rebuild of python-pip is required. On jammy and later, python-urllib3 is bundled in the python-pip package and needs to be patched. The fix for this issue may need a newer brotli 1.2.0 dependency, need to validate. See: https://github.com/google/brotli/commit/eb3a31e2d356d5a633de995afe7fe60e590a26d8 https://github.com/google/brotli/commit/28ce91caf605ac5481e9ca69131a28e1087574b7 https://github.com/google/brotli/commit/ef8922cee72a1c0b0c35ed109ae9d2d637177bfe

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package Patch details
python-urllib3