Post

NodeJS & HTTP Error 431

I recently found error responses from a Node JS microservice with HTTP error “431 Request Header Fields Too Large” but at first it seemed to be intermittent dependent on the test environment being used. Further investigations though found it to be a Node setting on the max header size combined with Node JS version changes and a few large cookies.

Error 431 Request Header Fields Too Large HTTP error indicates that the total size of the request headers (which includes cookies) is too large for the web server to accept. This often occurs where large cookies have built up maxing out the request size.

In 2018 Node (version 11.6.0) was updated to resolve a security vulnerability in this area - Denial of Service with large HTTP headers (CVE-2018-12121) and this resulted in the default max request headers size being reduced to 8kb (from 16kb), more info here (Interestingly 8kb was chosen as it was the NGINX default at the time). The default limit was eventually increased back to 16kb in v13.13.0 which means that if you happen to be running against a Node version between 11.6 and 13.13 then you will hit a 8kb limit but before or after those versions the limit won’t be hit until 16kb - which is the situation I was in recently.

If the default max header size for your node installation is not correct for you then it is easy to configure a new value using --max-http-header-size parameter.

--max-http-header-size=16250

Of course you shouldn’t set this value too high and should instead to configure it as low as feasible for your specific application.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.