CVE-2025-55163

Netty is an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework. Prior to versions 4.1.124.Final and 4.2.4.Final, Netty is vulnerable to MadeYouReset DDoS. This is a logical vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol, that uses malformed HTTP/2 control frames in order to break the max concurrent streams limit - which results in resource exhaustion and distributed denial of service. This issue has been patched in versions 4.1.124.Final and 4.2.4.Final.

Below is a technical explanation of a newly discovered vulnerability in HTTP/2, which we refer to as “MadeYouReset.”

MadeYouReset Vulnerability Summary

The MadeYouReset DDoS vulnerability is a logical vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol, that uses malformed HTTP/2 control frames in order to break the max concurrent streams limit - which results in resource exhaustion and distributed denial of service.

Mechanism

The vulnerability uses malformed HTTP/2 control frames, or malformed flow, in order to make the server reset streams created by the client (using the RST_STREAM frame). The vulnerability could be triggered by several primitives, defined by the RFC of HTTP/2 (RFC 9113). The Primitives are:

1. WINDOW_UPDATE frame with an increment of 0 or an increment that makes the window exceed 2^31 - 1. (section 6.9 + 6.9.1)
2. HEADERS or DATA frames sent on a half-closed (remote) stream (which was closed using the END_STREAM flag). (note that for some implementations it's possible a CONTINUATION frame to trigger that as well - but it's very rare). (Section 5.1)
3. PRIORITY frame with a length other than 5. (section 6.3) From our experience, the primitives are likely to exist in the decreasing order listed above. Note that based on the implementation of the library, other primitives (which are not defined by the RFC) might exist - meaning scenarios in which RST_STREAM is not supposed to be sent, but in the implementation it does. On the other hand - some RFC-defined primitives might not work, even though they are defined by the RFC (as some implementations are not fully complying with RFC). For example, some implementations we’ve seen discard the PRIORITY frame - and thus does not return RST_STREAM, and some implementations send GO_AWAY when receiving a WINDOW_UPDATE frame with increment of 0.

The vulnerability takes advantage of a design flaw in the HTTP/2 protocol - While HTTP/2 has a limit on the number of concurrently active streams per connection (which is usually 100, and is set by the parameter SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS), the number of active streams is not counted correctly - when a stream is reset, it is immediately considered not active, and thus unaccounted for in the active streams counter. While the protocol does not count those streams as active, the server’s backend logic still processes and handles the requests that were canceled.

Thus, the attacker can exploit this vulnerability to cause the server to handle an unbounded number of concurrent streams from a client on the same connection. The exploitation is very simple: the client issues a request in a stream, and then sends the control frame that causes the server to send a RST_STREAM.

Attack Flow

For example, a possible attack scenario can be:

1. Attacker opens an HTTP/2 connection to the server.
2. Attacker sends HEADERS frame with END_STREAM flag on a new stream X.
3. Attacker sends WINDOW_UPDATE for stream X with flow-control window of 0.
4. The server receives the WINDOW_UPDATE and immediately sends RST_STREAM for stream X to the client (+ decreases the active streams counter by 1).

The attacker can repeat steps 2+3 as rapidly as it is capable, since the active streams counter never exceeds 1 and the attacker does not need to wait for the response from the server. This leads to resource exhaustion and distributed denial of service vulnerabilities with an impact of: CPU overload and/or memory exhaustion (implementation dependent)

Comparison to Rapid Reset

The vulnerability takes advantage of a design flow in the HTTP/2 protocol that was also used in the Rapid Reset vulnerability (CVE-2023-44487) which was exploited as a zero-day in the wild in August 2023 to October 2023, against multiple services and vendors. The Rapid Reset vulnerability uses RST_STREAM frames sent from the client, in order to create an unbounded amount of concurrent streams - it was given a CVSS score of 7.5. Rapid Reset was mostly mitigated by…

A client might overload the server by issue frequent RST frames. This can cause a massive amount of load on the remote system and so cause a DDOS attack.

Impact

This is a DDOS attack, any http2 server is affected and so you should update as soon as possible.

Patches

This is patched in version 4.1.100.Final.

Workarounds

A user can limit the amount of RST frames that are accepted per connection over a timeframe manually using either an own Http2FrameListener implementation or an ChannelInboundHandler implementation (depending which http2 API is used).

References

• https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-44487
• https://blog.cloudflare.com/technical-breakdown-http2-rapid-reset-ddos-attack/
• https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/google-cloud-mitigated-largest-ddos-attack-peaking-above-398-million-rps/

Red Hat Lightwell has released io.netty:netty-codec-http2 4.1.100.Final-rhlw-00001 with backported fixes for CVE-2025-55163, CVE-2026-33871, CVE-2026-42587, CVE-2026-47244, CVE-2026-48043, CVE-2026-50560, CVE-2026-56819, and CVE-2026-59900.

CVE-2025-55163: Netty MadeYouReset HTTP/2 DDoS Vulnerability

CVE-2026-33871: Netty HTTP/2 CONTINUATION Frame Flood DoS via Zero-Byte Frame Bypass

CVE-2026-42587: Netty: HttpContentDecompressor maxAllocation bypass via Content-Encoding: br/zstd/snappy enables decompression bomb DoS

CVE-2026-47244: Netty HTTP/2: Advertised MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS are not enforced

CVE-2026-48043: netty-codec-http2: ByteBuf Reference-Count Leak in DelegatingDecompressorFrameListener Leads to Memory Exhaustion

CVE-2026-50560: Netty susceptible to HTTP/2 Reset Attack with different on-the-wire signature

CVE-2026-56819: Netty: HTTP/2 decompression leaks ByteBuf reference count when the decompressor channel is already closed (Direct memory leak / OOM DoS)

CVE-2026-59900: Netty codec-http2: Lack of Host Header Deduplication in HTTP/2→HTTP/1.x Translation Leads to Request Routing Bypass

This patched artifact is a drop-in replacement for io.netty:netty-codec-http2 4.1.100.Final from Maven Central.

Root has patched CVE-2025-55163 in the io.netty:netty-codec-http2 package for Root:Maven. Multiple fixed versions available.

Root has patched GHSA-xpw8-rcwv-8f8p in the io.root.io.netty:netty-codec-http2 package for Root:Maven. Multiple fixed versions available.

Netty is an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework. Prior to versions 4.1.124.Final and 4.2.4.Final, Netty is vulnerable to MadeYouReset DDoS. This is a logical vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol, that uses malformed HTTP/2 control frames in order to break the max concurrent streams limit - which results in resource exhaustion and distributed denial of service. This issue has been patched in versions 4.1.124.Final and 4.2.4.Final.

TuxCare rebuilt 43 io.netty packages to address 12 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.63.Final-tuxcare.2.

TuxCare rebuilt 4 io.netty packages to address 5 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.112.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 40 io.netty packages to address 9 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.49.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 46 io.netty packages to address 6 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.82.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 43 io.netty packages to address 15 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.60.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 12 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.93.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 7 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.92.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt io.netty:netty-codec-http2 to address 1 CVE. Fixed in 4.1.115.Final-tuxcare.5.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 59 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.122.Final-tuxcare.2.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 60 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.119.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 62 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.111.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 48 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.117.Final-tuxcare.3.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 61 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.108.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 61 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.107.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 62 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.94.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 7 io.netty packages to address 8 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.79.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 12 io.netty packages to address 19 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.75.Final-tuxcare.5.

TuxCare rebuilt 7 io.netty packages to address 11 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.52.Final-tuxcare.3.

TuxCare rebuilt 11 io.netty packages to address 20 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.73.Final-tuxcare.5.

TuxCare rebuilt 11 io.netty packages to address 18 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.87.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 19 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.99.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 5 io.netty packages to address 9 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.48.Final-tuxcare.4.

TuxCare rebuilt 6 io.netty packages to address 13 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.42.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 7 io.netty packages to address 15 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.101.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 47 io.netty packages to address 19 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.96.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 7 io.netty packages to address 13 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.100.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 9 io.netty packages to address 13 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.81.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 15 io.netty packages to address 27 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.72.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 43 io.netty packages to address 25 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.68.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 13 io.netty packages to address 24 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.114.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 6 io.netty packages to address 11 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.39.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 4 io.netty packages to address 6 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.24.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 4 io.netty packages to address 6 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.29.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 7 io.netty packages to address 10 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.21.Final-tuxcare.1.

TuxCare rebuilt 6 io.netty packages to address 7 CVEs. Fixed in 4.1.31.Final-tuxcare.1.