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GHSA-q6cq-mhr2-jmr5

Netty: [codec-haproxy] Signed-Byte Sentinel Collision in HAProxyMessageDecoder Leads to Unbounded Memory Exhaustion

Source: GitHub Advisory Database (reviewed) High CVE-2026-55851

Packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixed in
Maven io.netty:netty-codec-haproxy >= 4.2.0.Final, < 4.2.16.Final 4.2.16.Final
Maven io.netty:netty-codec-haproxy >= 4.1.0.Final, < 4.1.136.Final 4.1.136.Final

Details

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

The `HAProxyMessageDecoder` in netty's `codec-haproxy` module performs protocol version detection by reading the 13th byte of the inbound stream as a signed Java `byte` and widening it to `int` without masking. When an attacker sends a PROXY protocol v2 binary prefix (`0D 0A 0D 0A 00 0D 0A 51 55 49 54 0A`) followed by version byte `0xFF`, the sign extension produces `-1`, which collides with the decoder's "need more data" sentinel value. This collision traps the decoder in a version-detection loop where it perpetually requests more data without consuming any bytes, never instantiates the `HeaderExtractor` that enforces header size limits, and causes `ByteToMessageDecoder` to accumulate all subsequent inbound bytes into an unbounded `cumulation` buffer until the JVM exhausts its direct memory allocation.

References

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