CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-111496

CriticalCVSS 9.1
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.51%

44th percentile - higher than 44% of all known CVEs

Summary

A vulnerability in Kafka Streams involves arithmetic overflow when computing the next punctuation time. A record with a timestamp near Long.MAX_VALUE causes the next stream-time punctuation to overflow to a negative value, leading to an infinite loop in PunctuationQueue while holding a lock and stalling the StreamThread.

Risk Assessment

A single record can stop the affected StreamThread from processing, and the hang returns on restart because the record remains in the topic. An application whose partitions are all affected becomes unresponsive, potentially disrupting data processing.

Recommendation

Upgrade Kafka Streams to 4.2.2, 4.3.2, or 4.4.0. As defense in depth, restrict write access to source topics and keep log.message.timestamp.after.max.ms bounded on source topics.

Related vulnerabilities

Original NVD description (English source)

Kafka Streams derives its stream-time clock from record timestamps. PunctuationSchedule.next() computed the next punctuation time as timestamp + (intervalsMissed + 1) * interval with no overflow check. A record with a timestamp at or near Long.MAX_VALUE advances stream time to that value, so the next stream-time punctuation overflows to a negative time. PunctuationQueue then re-queues that time and loops on it indefinitely while holding a lock, stalling the StreamThread. Impact: A single record is enough. The affected StreamThread stops processing, and because the record stays in the topic the hang returns on restart; an application whose partitions are all affected becomes unresponsive. Only the Streams application is affected, not the brokers or the cluster. Triggering it needs write access to a source topic whose topology uses stream-time punctuation, and a broker that stores the record: brokers from Apache Kafka 4.0.0 reject such a timestamp by default (log.message.timestamp.after.max.ms, one hour), so it is reachable only on older brokers or where that bound has been relaxed. Mitigation: Upgrade Kafka Streams to 4.2.2, 4.3.2, or 4.4.0. As defense in depth, keep log.message.timestamp.after.max.ms bounded on source topics and restrict write access to them. Resolution: From Apache Kafka 4.2.2, 4.3.2, and 4.4.0: the next punctuation time is computed with overflow-checked arithmetic (clamped to Long.MAX_VALUE), and a rescheduled punctuation is re-queued only when its time moves forward.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS