Netty: [HttpContentEncoder] Unbounded Per-Connection Queue Growth via HTTP/1.1 Pipelining Leads to Denial of Service
HttpContentEncoder (the superclass of the production handler HttpContentCompressor) maintains a per-channel ArrayDeque<CharSequence> named acceptEncodingQueue that accumulates attacker-controlled data without any size limit. The queue is filled on the I/O thread for every inbound HTTP request and drained only when the application later writes a non-1xx response. This creates a resource exhaustion vulnerability when an attacker exploits HTTP/1.1 pipelining to flood the connection with requests faster than the application produces responses.
Why this VPI (explainable, experimental)
VPI breakdown
| Impact(default (no data)) | 55.00 |
| Exploitation signal(No additional exploitation signal) | ×1.00 |
| VPI | 55.00 |
VPI formula vpi-v1