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GHSA-jfg9-48mv-9qgx

Netty MQTT: Resource exhaustion in MqttDecoder

Source: GitHub Advisory Database (reviewed) Moderate CVE-2026-44248

Packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixed in
Maven io.netty:netty-codec-mqtt >= 4.2.0.Alpha1, < 4.2.13.Final 4.2.13.Final
Maven io.netty:netty-codec-mqtt < 4.1.133.Final 4.1.133.Final

Details

As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).

### Impact The MQTT 5 header Properties section is parsed and buffered _before_ any message size limit is applied. Specifically, in `MqttDecoder`, the `decodeVariableHeader()` method is called before the `bytesRemainingBeforeVariableHeader > maxBytesInMessage` check. The `decodeVariableHeader()` can call other methods which will call `decodeProperties()`. Effectively, Netty does not apply any limits to the size of the properties being decoded. Additionally, because `MqttDecoder` extends `ReplayingDecoder`, Netty will repeatedly re-parse the enormous Properties sections and buffer the bytes in memory, until the entire thing parses to completion. This can cause high resource usage in both CPU and memory. ### Resources `ANT-2026-09608` https://docs.oasis-open.org/mqtt/mqtt/v5.0/os/mqtt-v5.0-os.html#_Toc3901027

References

External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.