CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-34462 — Netty Netty security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

Netty is an asynchronous event-driven network application framework for rapid development of maintainable high performance protocol servers & clients. The `SniHandler` can allocate up to 16MB of heap for each channel during the TLS handshake. When the handler or the channel does not have an idle timeout, it can be used to make a TCP server using the `SniHandler` to allocate 16MB of heap. The `SniHandler` class is a handler that waits for the TLS handshake to configure a `SslHandler` according to the indicated server name by the `ClientHello` record. For this matter it allocates a `ByteBuf` using the value defined in the `ClientHello` record. Normally the value of the packet should be smaller than the handshake packet but there are not checks done here and the way the code is written, it is possible to craft a packet that makes the `SslClientHelloHandler`. This vulnerability has been fixed in version 4.1.94.Final.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-06-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-770

Affected products

  • netty / netty

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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