← back
CVE-2021-21290

Local Information Disclosure Vulnerability in Netty on Unix-Like systems due temporary files

CVSS 6.2 MEDIUMEPSS 1.8%CWE-378CWE-379
In short

Netty's multipart decoder creates temporary files with overly permissive permissions on Unix-like systems, allowing other local users to read sensitive uploaded data. This affects systems where temporary file storage is enabled.

Technical detail

When Netty versions before 4.1.59.Final process multipart uploads on Unix-like systems using AbstractDiskHttpData, temporary files are created via File.createTempFile() with default permissions (0644), allowing local privilege escalation to read sensitive data from the shared /tmp directory. The vulnerability requires the application to store uploads temporarily on disk and an attacker with local system access.

Summary generated and translated by AI from the official 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.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
Affected products
netty · netty

Want to know if your infrastructure is exposed to this?

Talk to TrueHacking →