What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2021-21290: Local Information Disclosure Vulnerability in Netty on Unix-Like systems due temporary files
- Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 1.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: yes
- Published: 2021-02-08 · updated 2026-10-08
- Weakness: CWE-378
Description
Netty is an open-source, asynchronous event-driven network application framework for rapid development of maintainable high performance protocol servers & clients. In Netty before version 4.1.59.Final there is a vulnerability on Unix-like systems involving an insecure temp file. When netty's multipart decoders are used local information disclosure can occur via the local system temporary directory if temporary storing uploads on the disk is enabled. On unix-like systems, the temporary directory is shared between all user. As such, writing to this directory using APIs that do not explicitly set the file/directory permissions can lead to information disclosure. Of note, this does not impact modern MacOS Operating Systems. The method "File.createTempFile" on unix-like systems creates a random file, but, by default will create this file with the permissions "-rw-r--r--". Thus, if sensitive information is written to this file, other local users can read this information. This is the case in netty's "AbstractDiskHttpData" is vulnerable. This has been fixed in version 4.1.59.Final. As a workaround, one may specify your own "java.io.tmpdir" when you start the JVM or use "DefaultHttpDataFactory.setBaseDir(...)" to set the directory to something that is only readable by the current user.
Affected products
- Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0
- Active IQ Unified Manager for VMware vSphere, Linux, and Microsoft Windows: all versions
- NetApp Cloud Secure Agent: all versions
- NetApp SnapCenter: all versions
- netty: before 4.1.59 — fixed in 4.1.59
- Oracle Banking Corporate Lending Process Management: 14.2.0, 14.3.0, 14.5.0
- Oracle Banking Credit Facilities Process Management: 14.2.0, 14.3.0, 14.5.0
- Oracle Corporation Oracle Banking Trade Finance Process Management: 14.2.0, 14.3.0, 14.5.0
- Oracle Corporation Communications BRM - Elastic Charging Engine: 12.0.0.3
- Oracle Communications Design Studio: 7.4.2
- Oracle Communications Messaging Server: 8.1
- Oracle Nosql Database: before 20.3 — fixed in 20.3
- quarkusio quarkus: through 1.13.7
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: netty 4.1.59; Oracle Nosql Database 20.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
- https://github.com/netty/netty/commit/c735357bf29d07856ad171c6611a2e1a0e0000ec
- https://github.com/netty/netty/security/advisories/GHSA-5mcr-gq6c-3hq2
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r0053443ce19ff125981559f8c51cf66e3ab4350f47812b8cf0733a05%40%3Cdev.kafka.apache.org%3E
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r02e467123d45006a1dda20a38349e9c74c3a4b53e2e07be0939ecb3f%40%3Cdev.ranger.apache.org%3E
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r0857b613604c696bf9743f0af047360baaded48b1c75cf6945a083c5%40%3Cjira.kafka.apache.org%3E
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r10308b625e49d4e9491d7e079606ca0df2f0a4d828f1ad1da64ba47b%40%3Cjira.kafka.apache.org%3E
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r1908a34b9cc7120e5c19968a116ddbcffea5e9deb76c2be4fa461904%40%3Cdev.zookeeper.apache.org%3E
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r2748097ea4b774292539cf3de6e3b267fc7a88d6c8ec40f4e2e87bd4%40%3Cdev.kafka.apache.org%3E
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r2936730ef0a06e724b96539bc7eacfcd3628987c16b1b99c790e7b87%40%3Cissues.zookeeper.apache.org%3E
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r2fda4dab73097051977f2ab818f75e04fbcb15bb1003c8530eac1059%40%3Cjira.kafka.apache.org%3E
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r326ec431f06eab7cb7113a7a338e59731b8d556d05258457f12bac1b%40%3Cdev.kafka.apache.org%3E
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r4efed2c501681cb2e8d629da16e48d9eac429624fd4c9a8c6b8e7020%40%3Cdev.tinkerpop.apache.org%3E
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