What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-56816: Netty: Memory Exhaustion via HTTP/3 Reserved Frame Types

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2026-07-21 · updated 2026-08-07
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

Netty is a network application framework for development of protocol servers and clients. Prior to 4.2.16.Final, Netty's `Http3FrameCodec` buffers incoming data for HTTP/3 reserved frame types up to the wire-specified payload length without limits; `decodeFrame` trusts `payLoadLength`, allowing an attacker to open multiple QUIC streams and send reserved frames with very large payload lengths to cause memory exhaustion and denial of service. This issue is fixed in version 4.2.16.Final.

Affected products

• netty: from 4.2.2 before 4.2.16 — fixed in 4.2.16

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: netty 4.2.16. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/netty/netty/commit/5b68c61f37aa4a3045cba624cbea239655c9003b
• https://github.com/netty/netty/releases/tag/netty-4.2.16.Final
• https://github.com/netty/netty/security/advisories/GHSA-hpcc-26xq-25fv

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