Case Study: Boost.Beast fixes high-risk DoS vulnerabilities and secures its C++ library with Bishop Fox

Securing the Foundation of Thousands of Web Applications

Boost.Beast, an open-source C++ header-only library used as the foundation for many networking projects, needed assurance that its HTTP/WebSocket code was free of dangerous vulnerabilities before release. To address this, Boost.Beast engaged Bishop Fox for an application and source code security assessment using their hybrid application assessment methodology.

Bishop Fox combined automated scans, targeted source-code review, manual code inspection, fuzz testing, and manual exploitation to find and validate issues. Bishop Fox identified multiple high‑risk denial‑of‑service vulnerabilities (demonstrating three attacks via malformed WebSocket frames) and a weak entropy issue that could affect masking and caching; the WebSocket crash was fixed in Boost’s first official release and the findings were publicly reported, protecting tens of thousands of downstream users.

Boost.Beast

Vinnie Falco

Author