Vulnerability details

## Summary Netty's epoll transport fails to detect and close TCP connections that receive a RST after being half-closed, leading to stale channels that are never cleaned up and, in some code paths, a 100% CPU busy-loop in the event loop thread. ## Affected versions All versions of 4.2.x `netty-transport-classes-epoll` up to and including 4.2.12.Final ## Fixed in 4.2.13.Final (fix merged into the `4.2` branch via [#16689](https://github.com/netty/netty/pull/16689); release not yet cut as of 2026-04-25). ## Severity **Medium** — Denial of Service (resource exhaustion / CPU spin) **CVSS:** 3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H - **7.5** **CWE:** CWE-772: Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime ## Description When a TCP connection using Netty's epoll transport has `ALLOW_HALF_CLOSURE` enabled (or is in a half-closed state via the HTTP codec), and the remote peer: 1. Sends a FIN (half-close), causing the server to mark the input as shutdown, then 2. Sends a RST (e.g. by closing with `SO_LINGER=0`) the server-side channel is never closed. This happens because: - `epollOutReady()` is a no-op when there is no pending flush. - `epollInReady()` short-circuits via `shouldBreakEpollInReady()` because input is already marked as shutdown. - The `EPOLLERR`/`EPOLLHUP` error condition is therefore never processed, and `channelInactive` is never fired. Depending on the Netty version and configuration, this results in: - **Stale channels**: The connection is never closed or deregistered. An unauthenticated remote attacker can repeat the sequence to accumulate stale connections, exhausting file descriptors, memory, or connection-count limits. - **CPU busy-loop**: In code paths where `clearEpollIn0()` is not called during the `ChannelInputShutdownReadComplete` event, `epoll_wait` returns immediately on every iteration for the affected fd, causing 100% CPU utilization on the event loop thread and starving all other connections multiplexed on it. ## Mitigation - Upgrade to 4.2.13.Final when released (or build from the `4.2` branch at commit [`0ec3d97`](https://github.com/netty/netty/commit/0ec3d97fab376e243d328ac95fbd288ba0f6e22d)). - If upgrading is not immediately possible, configure idle timeouts on connections to limit the lifetime of stale channels. ## References - Issue: https://github.com/netty/netty/issues/16683 - Fix: https://github.com/netty/netty/pull/16689