CVE-2026-1605
Published: 05 March 2026
Summary
CVE-2026-1605 is a high-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Eclipse Jetty. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190); ranked at the 10.2th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 SC-6 (Resource Availability) and SI-2 (Flaw Remediation).
Deeper analysis
CVE-2026-1605 is a resource leak vulnerability in the GzipHandler class of Eclipse Jetty, affecting versions 12.0.0 through 12.0.31 and 12.1.0 through 12.0.5. The issue arises when processing a compressed HTTP request with Content-Encoding: gzip, where the JDK Inflater is allocated to decompress the request but not released. This occurs because the release mechanism is tied to generating a compressed response, which does not trigger if the response is uncompressed, leading to a memory leak. The vulnerability is rated 7.5 on the CVSS v3.1 scale (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H) and is associated with CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption) and CWE-401 (Memory Leak).
Unauthenticated remote attackers can exploit this vulnerability by sending HTTP requests with gzip-compressed content where the server responds without compression. Repeated exploitation causes progressive memory consumption as Inflater instances accumulate without release, potentially leading to denial of service through resource exhaustion.
For mitigation details, refer to the Jetty security advisory at https://github.com/jetty/jetty.project/security/advisories/GHSA-xxh7-fcf3-rj7f.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2026-9815
Vulnerability details
In Eclipse Jetty, versions 12.0.0-12.0.31 and 12.1.0-12.0.5, class GzipHandler exposes a vulnerability when a compressed HTTP request, with Content-Encoding: gzip, is processed and the corresponding response is not compressed. This happens because the JDK Inflater is allocated for decompressing the…
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request, but it is not released because the release mechanism is tied to the compressed response. In this case, since the response is not compressed, the release mechanism does not trigger, causing the leak.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Remote unauthenticated exploitation of public-facing Jetty web server via crafted gzip requests directly enables T1190; resulting memory exhaustion DoS matches T1499.004 Application or System Exploitation.
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Directly remediates the memory leak flaw in Eclipse Jetty's GzipHandler by identifying, reporting, and applying vendor patches or upgrades to affected versions.
Protects system resources from exhaustion by implementing controls that prevent unauthorized depletion due to unreleased JDK Inflater instances from repeated gzip requests.
Limits the impact of denial-of-service attacks exploiting the memory leak through repeated gzip-compressed HTTP requests without compressed responses.