VulnerabilityDeferred

CVE-2026-100661

HIGH 8.7EPSS 0.34%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.34%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

Netty's HTTP/3 codec (io.netty:netty-codec-http3) versions 4.2.0.Final through 4.2.17.Final contain a denial-of-service vulnerability in the QPACK prefixed-integer decoder (QpackUtil.decodePrefixedInteger), which does not bound the number of continuation bytes it will process. A remote, unauthenticated peer can open a QPACK unidirectional stream (type 0x02 encoder or 0x03 decoder) and send a first byte with all prefix bits set (e.g. 0xFF for a 7-bit prefix or 0x3F for a 5-bit prefix) followed by an endless run of 0x80 continuation bytes. The decoder returns -1 ('need more bytes'), so callers never consume the input, the ByteToMessageDecoder cumulator grows without bound, and each decode() invocation re-scans the whole accumulated buffer, yielding O(N^2) CPU cost. The result is unbounded per-connection heap growth (OutOfMemoryError) and event-loop CPU starvation, reachable in every configuration. Fixed in 4.2.18.Final.

CVSS 4.0: 8.7 HIGHCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/M
EPSS: 0.34% probability · 28th percentile
Public exploits: None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV: Not listed
Weakness: CWE-400
Source: disclosure@vulncheck.com

EPSS trend

EPSS moved from 0.3% on 27 September 2026 to 0.3% on 26 October 2026.

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.