Vulnerability details

### Impact With WebSocket compression enabled, the client inflates `permessage-deflate` messages with no limit on the decompressed size. It installed Netty's shared `WebSocketClientCompressionHandler.INSTANCE`, whose inflater is unbounded, and `webSocketMaxFrameSize` and `webSocketMaxBufferSize` only bound the compressed bytes, because the frame aggregator sits in front of the inflater. A malicious or compromised WebSocket server, or anyone on the path of a `ws://` connection, can therefore send a message of about 2 MiB that inflates to about 2 GiB, the most a Netty buffer can hold. The client then copies the inflated message again to hand it to the listener. That exhausts the heap of a typically sized JVM. Netty catches the resulting `OutOfMemoryError` and closes that connection, but while the buffer is live any other allocation in the process can fail too, and a server that keeps sending such messages, on one connection or several, keeps the client at heap exhaustion. ### Who is Impacted Only applications that enable WebSocket compression with `setEnablewebSocketCompression(true)`, which is off by default, and connect to a WebSocket server that is untrusted, compromised, or reached over cleartext `ws://`. ### Affected versions * 3.x: up to and including 3.0.13 * 2.x: from 2.2.0, when WebSocket compression was added, up to and including 2.16.1 ### Patches Fixed in 3.0.14. A new setting, `webSocketMaxDecompressedFrameSize` (`setWebSocketMaxDecompressedFrameSize`, or the `org.asynchttpclient.webSocketMaxDecompressedFrameSize` property), bounds how far a message may inflate, and a message that would go past it fails the connection. It defaults to 128000000 bytes, the same as `webSocketMaxBufferSize`, so a message is bounded alike whether or not it was compressed; a compressed message that inflates past that, which was accepted before, now fails the connection. With `aggregateWebSocketFrameFragments` turned off, the bound applies to each frame instead, and fragments are delivered one at a time. Set it lower if you enable compression and do not expect large messages. `0` disables the limit. The 2.x line is end of life and will not receive a fix. Upgrade to 3.0.14. ### Workarounds Leave WebSocket compression disabled, which is the default. ### Details After the handshake the inbound pipeline is `ws-decoder`, `ws-aggregator`, `PerMessageDeflateDecoder`, `ahc-ws`: the aggregator, which enforces `webSocketMaxBufferSize`, sees each message before it is inflated. `WebSocketClientCompressionHandler.INSTANCE` is built with `maxAllocation = 0`, which Netty treats as unbounded, and Netty has deprecated it in favour of a constructor that takes a limit. RFC 6455 Section 10.4 asks an implementation to limit the size of a message after reassembly, and under RFC 7692 Section 6.2 the message delivered to the application is the decompressed payload. This is a different path from the HTTP response decompression fixed under CVE-2026-85721, which never reached the WebSocket pipeline. ### Attribution AI-assisted tools were used to support discovery and analysis.