CDN Tsunami: Exploiting HTTP/3-HTTP/1.1 Conversion for DoS Attacks

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26589v1
• Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:09:36 GMT
• Title: CDN Tsunami: Exploiting HTTP/3-HTTP/1.1 Conversion for DoS Attacks
• Abstract summary: We study the first study of DoS attacks against HTTP/3 protocols deployed at CDNs.<n>Our key insight is that when the CDN adopts HTTP/3 but the host websites use HTTP/1.1, an adversary can utilize the disparity to amplify a small amount of traffic to the CDN.<n>We conduct a large-scale measurement upon the Tranco Top 1M domain list to quantify the real-world impact of these attacks.
• Score: 39.862345027090534
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) provide high availability, accelerate content delivery for their host websites, but are also vulnerable to different types of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Prior works have studied a variety of DoS attacks with HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 connections, but most of them are being fixed, making CDNs robust against such attacks. One unexplored research area is how the recent introduction of HTTP/3 at CDNs affects the DoS attack landscape, especially when there are heterogeneous deployments of HTTP/3 and HTTP/1.1 between CDNs and host websites. In this paper, we design the first study of DoS attacks against HTTP/3 protocols deployed at CDNs. Our key insight is that when the CDN adopts HTTP/3 but the host websites use HTTP/1.1, an adversary can utilize the disparity to amplify a small amount of traffic to the CDN using HTTP/3 to a large amount from the CDN to the host website using HTTP/1.1. More specifically, we design two attack variations-HTTP/3 Bandwidth Amplification (HBA) and HTTP/3 Connection Amplification (HCA)-targeting the bandwidth and the number of connections, respectively. Furthermore, we conduct a large-scale measurement upon the Tranco Top 1M domain list to quantify the real-world impact of these attacks, identifying 42,330 subdomains that are potentially vulnerable to our attacks. Finally, we responsibly disclose the details of our attacks to the affected CDN vendors: so far, two vendors have already acknowledged their vulnerabilities with bounties and have deployed our mitigations.

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