CVE-2026-59902 Netty: Memory Exhaustion in SctpMessageCompletionHandler
Unauthenticated attackers can exhaust memory in Netty applications by sending large SCTP fragments, causing denial of service.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-59902?
CVE-2026-59902 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Netty Netty, published on 17 Aug 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Netty is an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework. Prior to 4.1.137.Final and 4.2.17.Final, io.netty.handler.codec.sctp.SctpMessageCompletionHandler limits incomplete messages and fragment counts but not maxBufferedBytes, allowing unauthenticated peers to exhaust memory with large SCTP fragments. This issue is fixed in versions 4.1.137.Final and 4.2.17.Final.
Weakness: CWE-400
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-59902?
4 open source packages ship an affected version, including io.netty:netty-transport-sctp. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
io.netty:netty-transport-sctp Maven | All versions | 4.1.137.Final |
io.netty:netty-transport-sctp Maven | All versions | 4.1.137.Final |
io.netty:netty-transport-sctp Maven | From 4.2.0.Final | 4.2.17.Final |
io.netty:netty-transport-sctp Maven | From 4.2.0.Final | 4.2.17.Final |
Products include Netty Netty.
How do I fix CVE-2026-59902?
Upgrade io.netty:netty-transport-sctp to a fixed version for your release line: 4.1.137.Final or 4.2.17.Final.
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-2026-59902 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-59902 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
- CVE-2026-75596 Netty: Fragmented ClientHello records trigger quadratic pre-handshake reassembly in default SNI parsing
- CVE-2026-59901 Netty Bzip2Decoder: Infinite Loop in RLE State Machine Leads to Event-Loop Thread Hang
- CVE-2026-55851 Netty codec-haproxy: Signed-Byte Sentinel Collision in HAProxyMessageDecoder Leads to Unbounded Memory Exhaustion
- CVE-2026-56745 Netty SpdyHttpDecoder: ByteBuf Reference Leak on RST_STREAM Leads to Native Memory Exhaustion
Sources
Also known as CLEANSTART-2026-DD90404, CLEANSTART-2026-NS79204, CLSA-2026-1788874301, CLSA-2026-1789146166, CLSA-2026-1789211588, CLSA-2026-1789219941 and 14 more.