highCVSS 7.5Vulnerability

GHSA-v74w-7mr3-4qg3

### 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.

Properties

ghsa_id
GHSA-v74w-7mr3-4qg3
summary
Netty: Denial of Service in XmlFrameDecoder via CPU Exhaustion
severity
high
cvss_score
7.5
cve_id
GHSA-v74w-7mr3-4qg3
cvss_vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
is_ghsa_only
true
ghsa_published
2026-07-24T16:53:04Z
source_url
https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-v74w-7mr3-4qg3
ghsa_updated
2026-07-24T16:53:07Z

Related Entities (4)

REPORTED_BY (1)

[Source]GitHub Advisory Database

VULNERABLE_TO (1)

[Software]maven/io.netty:netty-codec-xml

AFFECTS (1)

[Software]maven/io.netty:netty-codec-xml

HAS_WEAKNESS (1)

[Weakness]Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

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GHSA-v74w-7mr3-4qg3 (CVSS 7.5) — Ninja Signal Threat Intelligence | Ninja Signal