CVE-2026-48006: high-severity vulnerability in netty
Netty's Lack of Lifecycle Cleanup Leads to Pooled ByteBuf Leak in RedisArrayAggregator
Published · Updated
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.7epss 0.8%
exploitation probability
0.8%top 43% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
Netty is a network application framework for development of protocol servers and clients. Prior to versions 4.1.135.Final and 4.2.15.Final, the RedisArrayAggregator handler permanently leaks pooled direct-memory buffers when a Redis pipeline connection closes before a RESP array aggregate completes. The handler retains child messages in per-handler state (`depths` field) but defines no `channelInactive`, `handlerRemoved`, or `exceptionCaught` method to release them when the pipeline tears down. Because the leaked buffers are slices of `PooledByteBufAllocator` chunks, they prevent those chunks from being returned to the JVM-wide direct-memory pool. Repeated connection churn by any network peer monotonically drains this shared pool, eventually causing allocation failures on all Netty channels in the process. Versions 4.1.135.Final and 4.2.15.Final patch the issue.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected products
netty · nettyRelated CVEs — netty
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2021-21409MEDIUMPossible request smuggling in HTTP/2 due missing validation of content-lengthEPSS 4.9%CVE-2021-43797MEDIUMHTTP fails to validate against control chars in header names which may lead to HTTP request smugglingEPSS 2.9%CVE-2023-34462MEDIUMnetty-handler SniHandler 16MB allocationEPSS 2.5%CVE-2025-24970HIGHSslHandler doesn't correctly validate packets which can lead to native crash when using native SSLEngineEPSS 2.2%CVE-2021-21290MEDIUMLocal Information Disclosure Vulnerability in Netty on Unix-Like systems due temporary filesEPSS 1.8%CVE-2026-45416HIGHNetty: SNI handler pre-allocates up to 16 MiB from nine attacker bytesEPSS 1.6%
References
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:37390https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:41951https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:50085https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:53644https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:53645https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:53646https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-48006https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2488433https://github.com/netty/netty/releases/tag/netty-4.1.135.Finalhttps://github.com/netty/netty/releases/tag/netty-4.2.15.Finalhttps://github.com/netty/netty/security/advisories/GHSA-6jv9-x5w9-2ccmhttps://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-48006.json