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RUSTSEC-2026-0462

Unbounded response body buffering in Streamable HTTP clients

Reported
Issued
Package
rmcp (crates.io)
Type
Vulnerability
Categories
Keywords
#mcp #http #memory-exhaustion
Aliases
References
CVSS Score
6.5 MEDIUM
CVSS Details
Attack Vector
Network
Attack Complexity
Low
Privileges Required
None
User Interaction
Required
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality Impact
None
Integrity Impact
None
Availability Impact
High
CVSS Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Patched
  • >=3.9.0
Unaffected
  • <0.2.0

Description

Before 3.9.0, the built-in Streamable HTTP clients in rmcp read non-streaming HTTP response bodies into memory with no size limit. Both the reqwest client (transport-streamable-http-client-reqwest) and the Unix socket client (transport-streamable-http-client-unix-socket) were affected:

A malicious or compromised MCP server can answer with a body that never ends, for example a chunked application/json response that streams whitespace. The client buffers it until the process runs out of memory. This works during initialize, before any authentication. On desktop or agent hosts, this terminates the whole host application.

Server-sent event streams are not affected. Each event is already capped by max_sse_event_size, and events are not accumulated.

The flaw was corrected in 3.9.0. Successful JSON bodies are limited to 16 MiB and non-success bodies to 64 KiB. Bytes are counted while streaming, after decompression. An oversized Content-Length is rejected before the body is read, and an oversized body is rejected with StreamableHttpError::ResponseBodyTooLarge instead of being truncated.

If you cannot upgrade, use a custom StreamableHttpClient that enforces a response body limit, or connect only to trusted MCP servers.

Advisory available under CC0-1.0 license.