high

GHSA-v74w-7mr3-4qg3

Maven · io.netty:netty-codec-xml

Summary

Netty: Denial of Service in XmlFrameDecoder via CPU Exhaustion

Severity
high
CVSS
7.5
CWE
CWE-400
Published
2026-07-24
Updated
2026-07-24

Advisory details

Summary

An attacker can cause Denial of Service by sending a specially crafted malicious XML payload (e.g., repeated </ characters) to a Netty server utilizing XmlFrameDecoder, causing the server's EventLoop thread to exhaust CPU resources and become unresponsive.

Details

io.netty.handler.codec.xml.XmlFrameDecoder suffers from a vulnerability resulting in CPU exhaustion. When < followed by / is encountered, the decoder scans the remaining buffer for a closing >. Because the parser state is not saved between decode() invocations, an attacker can trickle-feed a payload of </ characters. This forces the decoder to repeatedly rescan the entire accumulated buffer. A 1MB maxFrameLength is enough to completely hang a server's thread while it loops endlessly.

Impact

Denial of Service via CPU Exhaustion. Any application utilizing Netty's XmlFrameDecoder is impacted. An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit this flaw by sending a modest amount of malformed XML data to an exposed port.

References

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Sources: CISA KEV (public domain), OSV.dev & GitHub Advisory Database (CC-BY-4.0), FIRST EPSS, NVD/CWE (public domain). Served live from the Stateward advisory database.