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GHSA-v74w-7mr3-4qg3

Netty: Denial of Service in XmlFrameDecoder via CPU Exhaustion

Source: GitHub Advisory Database (reviewed) High CVE-2026-73507

Packages

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

Details

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

### 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

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