CVE-2026-44248 PUBLISHED

Netty: Resource exhaustion in MqttDecoder

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 05.05.2026 Published: 13.05.2026 Updated: 13.05.2026

Netty is an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework. Prior to 4.2.13.Final and 4.1.133.Final, 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. This vulnerability is fixed in 4.2.13.Final and 4.1.133.Final.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CVSS Score: 5.3

Product Status

Vendor netty
Product netty
Versions
  • Version >= 4.2.0.Alpha1, < 4.2.13.Final is affected
  • Version < 4.1.133.Final is affected
Vendor io.netty
Product netty-codec-mqtt
Versions
  • Version >= 4.2.0.Alpha1, < 4.2.13.Final is affected
  • Version < 4.1.133.Final is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption CWE