Summary
Denial-of-service vulnerability processing large chat messages containing many newlines
Workarounds
Handle DataPacketReceiveEvent and check for these excessive newlines in incoming TextPacket.
For more information
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Impact
PocketMine-MP caps maximum chat message length at 512 Unicode characters, or about 2048 bytes. No more than 2 chat messages may be sent per tick. However, due to legacy reasons, incoming chat message blobs are split by \n, and each part is treated as a separate message, the length of each part is individually checked. The length of the whole message is not checked.
This leads to an exploitable performance issue, in which a malicious client may send a chat packet of several megabytes containing nothing but \n newline characters. The server will parse this into a very large array and spend a long time (several milliseconds) iterating over it for no reason.
Furthermore, due to the lack of sufficient rate limit checks before parsing messages, malicious clients may bombard the server with many thousands of these malicious messages, causing lockups for a significant amount of time (seconds or minutes).
GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672 has a CVSS score of 5.3 (Medium). The vector is network-reachable, no privileges required, and no user interaction. A CVSS score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether this affects your application depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable in your environment. A fixed version is available (4.2.10); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.
Affected versions
Security releases
Kodem intelligence
Severity tells you how bad this could be in the worst case. It does not tell you whether you are exposed. Exploitability and impact are functions of runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A vulnerable package can sit in your dependency tree and never run.
Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter. Kodem's runtime-powered SCA identifies whether this CVE is reachable in your applications.
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This bug was addressed in https://github.com/pmmp/PocketMine-MP/commit/df33e179e5d3ff13b56a2d7060bf592b0f797258 by:
- checking the length of the incoming message as a whole before parsing it - it may not be larger than
messageCounter * maxChatMessageSize(messageCounteris decremented once for every message sent) - limiting the maximum number of times a message may be split on newlines before giving up and discarding the message (maximum 3 parts; anything after the first 2 parts is discarded)
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672? GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672 is a medium-severity security vulnerability in pocketmine/pocketmine-mp (composer), affecting versions < 4.2.10. It is fixed in 4.2.10.
- How severe is GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672? GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672 has a CVSS score of 5.3 (Medium). This score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether it represents real risk in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable.
- Which versions of pocketmine/pocketmine-mp are affected by GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672? pocketmine/pocketmine-mp (composer) versions < 4.2.10 is affected.
- Is there a fix for GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672? Yes. GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672 is fixed in 4.2.10. Upgrade to this version or later.
- Is GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672 is exploitable in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable. A CVSS score is a worst-case rating; it does not account for your specific deployment, configuration, or usage patterns. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to show which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so you can focus on the ones that represent real risk. Get a demo
- What actually determines whether GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672 is exploitable, and how bad it is? Exploitability and impact are not fixed properties of a CVE. They depend on runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A high CVSS score on a dependency that never runs is not the same as real risk. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
- How do I fix GHSA-GJ94-V4P9-W672? Upgrade
pocketmine/pocketmine-mpto 4.2.10 or later.