Netty: Resource exhaustion in MqttDecoder
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fixed in 4.2.13.Final, 4.1.133.Final
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
- Exploitation: none
- Automatable: yes
- Technical impact: partial
Summary
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.
Timeline
- CVE published
- CISA SSVC assessment
Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- netty netty
From 4.2.0.Alpha1 · fixed in 4.2.13.Final; fixed in 4.1.133.Final
- io.netty netty-codec-mqtt
From 4.2.0.Alpha1 · fixed in 4.2.13.Final; fixed in 4.1.133.Final
- io.netty:netty-codec-mqttMaven
From 4.2.0.Alpha1 · fixed in 4.2.13.Final
- io.netty:netty-codec-mqttMaven
fixed in 4.1.133.Final