CVE-2014-3488 Denial of service in Netty

What is CVE-2014-3488?

CVE-2014-3488 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Netty Netty, published on 31 Jul 2014. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The SslHandler in Netty before 3.9.2 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop and CPU consumption) via a crafted SSLv2Hello message.

Weakness: CWE-119

Which versions are affected by CVE-2014-3488?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including io.netty:netty-handler. It affects 1 product.

Products include Netty Netty.

How do I fix CVE-2014-3488?

Upgrade io.netty:netty-handler to 3.9.2 or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2014-3488 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2014-3488 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Netty Netty

• CVE-2026-75595 Netty: SNI Routing Bypass via Fragmented TLS ClientHello Causing Fallback to Default SslContext Critical 9.1
• CVE-2026-75596 Netty: Fragmented ClientHello records trigger quadratic pre-handshake reassembly in default SNI parsing High 8.7
• CVE-2026-59901 Netty Bzip2Decoder: Infinite Loop in RLE State Machine Leads to Event-Loop Thread Hang High 8.7
• CVE-2026-55851 Netty codec-haproxy: Signed-Byte Sentinel Collision in HAProxyMessageDecoder Leads to Unbounded Memory Exhaustion High 8.7
• CVE-2026-56745 Netty SpdyHttpDecoder: ByteBuf Reference Leak on RST_STREAM Leads to Native Memory Exhaustion High 8.7

All Netty Netty vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-9959-6p3m-wxpc.