Launch Week Day 1: Announcing Security Design Review
MEDIUM 5.3 Maven

netty-codec-http2: ByteBuf Reference-Count Leak in DelegatingDecompressorFrameListener Leads to Memory Exhaustion

GHSA-c2gf-v879-257j · CVE-2026-48043

Published · Modified

Description

Impact

The DelegatingDecompressorFrameListener class orchestrates HTTP/2 decompression by embedding a per-stream EmbeddedChannel that runs the appropriate decompression codec (gzip, deflate, zstd) and forwards decompressed chunks to a wrapped listener. Each decompressed chunk is a pooled ByteBuf handed to an anonymous ChannelInboundHandlerAdapter tail handler, which becomes the sole owner responsible for releasing it.

A remote peer could send frames that would result in the flow-controller throwing and so trigger a resource leak which at the end might take down the whole JVM due OOME.

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