CVE-2026-100660
HighCVSS 7.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk29th percentile - higher than 29% of all known CVEs
Summary
Netty's HTTP/3 codec from 4.2.0.Final through 4.2.17.Final retains unbounded per-stream QPACK encoder state, allowing an attacker to cause unbounded heap growth and denial of service.
Risk Assessment
A remote unauthenticated client can cause denial of service via memory exhaustion.
Recommendation
Upgrade Netty to 4.2.18.Final or later.
Other vulnerabilities in Netty
See all- CVE-2026-42583High
Netty prior to versions 4.2.13.Final and 4.1.133.Final has a vulnerability in Lz4FrameDecoder that allocates a ByteBuf of size decompressedLength, potentially leading to uncontrolled memory allocation. An attacker can exploit a 21-byte header and compressed data to force this allocation.
- CVE-2026-42577High
Netty, an asynchronous network application framework, has an issue in versions from 4.2.0.Final to 4.2.13.Final where the epoll transport fails to detect and close TCP connections that receive a RST after being half-closed. This leads to stale channels that are never cleaned up and, in some code paths, a 100% CPU busy-loop in the event loop thread.
- CVE-2016-4970High
In Netty versions 4.0.x before 4.0.37.Final and 4.1.x before 4.1.1.Final, a vulnerability in OpenSslEngine.java allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop).
- CVE-2026-75595Critical
Netty is an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework. Prior to 4.1.137.Final and 4.2.17.Final, io.netty.handler.ssl.SslClientHelloHandler#decode checks the wrong offset before reading the four-byte TLS handshake header, so a ClientHello whose handshake header spans records can cause an IndexOutOfBoundsException and invoke select(ctx, null). This selects the default SslContext instead of the SNI-specific context. In deployments where per-SNI clientAuth=REQUIRE is the sole mutual TLS gate, the default SslContext uses clientAuth=NONE or clientAuth=OPTIONAL, and no application-layer certificate verification exists, an unauthenticated remote attacker can bypass the protected route's mutual TLS requirement. This issue is fixed in versions 4.1.137.Final and 4.2.17.Final.
- CVE-2026-56817Critical
Netty versions 4.2.0.Final through 4.2.15.Final and 4.1.0.Final through 4.1.135.Final have a vulnerability in XmlDecoder where delivering XML with a DOCTYPE declaration to an AsyncXMLInputFactory without security configuration can activate DTD and entity handling, creating XML External Entity (XXE) risk.
- CVE-2021-21409Medium
Netty (io.netty:netty-codec-http2) before version 4.1.61.Final contains a vulnerability enabling request smuggling. The content-length header is not correctly validated if the request only uses a single Http2HeaderFrame with endStream set to true. This could lead to request smuggling if the request is proxied to a remote peer and translated to HTTP/1.1. This is a followup of GHSA-wm47-8v5p-wjpj/CVE-2021-21295 which missed to fix this one case. Fixed as part of 4.1.61.Final.
- CVE-2021-21295Medium
Netty (io.netty:netty-codec-http2) before version 4.1.60.Final contains a vulnerability enabling request smuggling. When an HTTP/2 request is converted to HTTP/1.1 by `Http2StreamFrameToHttpObjectCodec` and forwarded to a remote peer, the Content-Length header is not validated by `Http2MultiplexHandler`, allowing an attacker to smuggle additional requests within the body.
- CVE-2019-20445Critical
HttpObjectDecoder.java in Netty before 4.1.44 allows a Content-Length header to be accompanied by a second Content-Length header, or by a Transfer-Encoding header, which may lead to improper processing of HTTP requests.
- CVE-2019-20444Critical
HttpObjectDecoder.java in Netty before 4.1.44 allows an HTTP header that lacks a colon, which might be interpreted as a separate header with incorrect syntax or as an "invalid fold". This can lead to incorrect parsing of HTTP requests.
- CVE-2019-16869High
Netty before 4.1.42.Final mishandles whitespace before the colon in HTTP headers (such as a "Transfer-Encoding : chunked" line), which leads to HTTP request smuggling.
Original NVD description (English source)
Netty's HTTP/3 codec (io.netty:netty-codec-http3) from 4.2.0.Final through 4.2.17.Final retains unbounded per-stream QPACK encoder state. QpackEncoder stores a queue and a dynamic-table index tracker for every encoded field section that references the QPACK dynamic table, keyed by the peer-controlled QUIC stream ID, and these entries are released only when the remote decoder sends a Section Acknowledgment or Stream Cancellation instruction — not when the HTTP/3 stream completes. There is no limit on the number of tracked streams, field sections, or retained bytes. A remote, unauthenticated HTTP/3 client can advertise a non-zero QPACK dynamic-table capacity, acknowledge the table insertion so the server reuses a dynamically indexed response header, and then omit all mandatory Section Acknowledgments while issuing sequential requests over a single QUIC connection, bypassing concurrent-stream limits and causing unbounded heap growth until the server exhausts memory (denial of service). Fixed in 4.2.18.Final.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

