VDB
KO
HIGH 7.5

GHSA-2qj4-mmr9-4v2f

Netty: Memory Exhaustion in SctpMessageCompletionHandler

Quick fix

GHSA-2qj4-mmr9-4v2f — io.netty:netty-transport-sctp: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

# pom.xml: bump <version>4.2.17.Final</version> for io.netty:netty-transport-sctp

Details

### Summary SctpMessageCompletionHandler does not limit the total size of buffered fragments, allowing an unauthenticated attacker to cause an OutOfMemoryError by sending large SCTP fragments.

### Details `io.netty.handler.codec.sctp.SctpMessageCompletionHandler` buffers fragments for incomplete SCTP messages. The fix for CVE-2026-46340 fixed unbounded memory growth by introducing limits on the number of concurrent incomplete messages (maxIncompleteSctpMessages) and the number of fragments per message (maxFragments).

While the count of fragments is now bounded, the handler still does not enforce a maximum size in bytes.

With the default limits of 128 messages and 128 fragments, and a typical max SCTP chunk size of 64KB, an attacker can consume up to ~1GB per connection. By opening a small number of concurrent connections, an attacker can easily exhaust the server's memory, causing an OutOfMemoryError.

### Impact Memory Exhaustion. Any application using Netty's SCTP transport with SctpMessageCompletionHandler is impacted.

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

Maven / io.netty:netty-transport-sctp
Introduced in: 4.2.0.Final Fixed in: 4.2.17.Final
Fix # pom.xml: bump <version>4.2.17.Final</version> for io.netty:netty-transport-sctp
Maven / io.netty:netty-transport-sctp
Introduced in: 0 Fixed in: 4.1.137.Final
Fix # pom.xml: bump <version>4.1.137.Final</version> for io.netty:netty-transport-sctp

References