CVE-2026-47244
MediumCVSS 5.3Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk39th percentile - higher than 39% of all known CVEs
Summary
Netty, a network application framework, prior to versions 4.1.135.Final and 4.2.15.Final, does not limit the number of active streams in HTTP/2, potentially leading to excessive resource consumption. The lack of a default limit on the maximum number of streams can result in the creation of hundreds of thousands of stream objects in a single TCP connection.
Risk Assessment
Organizations may experience significant performance and stability issues with their servers, potentially leading to service outages. Increased backend load due to the absence of a stream limit may also raise operational costs.
Recommendation
It is recommended to upgrade to versions 4.1.135.Final or 4.2.15.Final to patch this vulnerability. Additionally, configuring a maximum number of concurrent streams in the application is advisable to prevent excessive resource consumption.
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 is a network application framework for development of protocol servers and clients. Prior to versions 4.1.135.Final and 4.2.15.Final, DefaultHttp2Connection.DefaultEndpoint initialises maxActiveStreams/maxStreams to Integer.MAX_VALUE, and Http2Settings never inserts SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS by default (Http2Settings.java:305-307 only clamps a user-supplied value). Unless the application explicitly calls initialSettings().maxConcurrentStreams(n), a Netty HTTP/2 server advertises no limit and enforces none locally. Each open stream allocates a DefaultStream object, PropertyMap slots, flow-controller state and IntObjectHashMap entry; with ~2^30 permissible odd stream IDs a single TCP connection can create hundreds of thousands of long-lived stream objects. This is also the precondition for CVE-2023-44487-style Rapid-Reset amplification, where the absence of a low concurrent cap multiplies backend work. Versions 4.1.135.Final and 4.2.15.Final patch the issue.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

