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)
VULNERABLE_TO (1)
AFFECTS (1)
HAS_WEAKNESS (1)
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