Executive brief
SmallRye Fault Tolerance is a library used by Quarkus microservices to manage retries and circuit breakers. A memory leak in the ApplyGuard and ApplyFaultTolerance annotations causes internal tracking objects to accumulate without being released, eventually exhausting memory and crashing the application. An attacker can remotely trigger this leak without authentication to cause a denial of service.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a resource exhaustion flaw (CWE-400) in SmallRye Fault Tolerance where internal metrics-related objects are not released during programmatic guard invocations. This causes steady memory consumption growth with each request when using ApplyGuard or ApplyFaultTolerance annotations. The flaw can be exploited remotely without authentication or user interaction to exhaust heap memory and crash the application.
Affected products
- SmallRye Fault Tolerance
- Red Hat Quarkus
Timeline
- 2026-09-21: disclosed