CVE-2026-53937

MCP Kotlin SDK's unbounded line buffer in StdioServerTransport/StdioClientTransport leads to memory exhaustion (DoS)

State
Published
Severity
6.2 Medium
Published
Sep 8, 2026
Updated
Sep 14, 2026
Reserved
Jun 11, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

MCP Kotlin SDK is the Kotlin Multiplatform software development kit for the Model Context Protocol. In versions 0.7.0 through 0.12.0, `ReadBuffer.append` in `kotlin-sdk-core/src/commonMain/kotlin/io/modelcontextprotocol/kotlin/sdk/shared/ReadBuffer.kt` writes every chunk of bytes received from the stdio transport into a `kotlinx.io.Buffer` with no size cap. Frames are extracted from that buffer only when a `\n` (0x0a) byte is observed. A peer that streams bytes without ever sending a newline causes the internal buffer to grow indefinitely until the JVM (or the surrounding host process) is OOM-killed. The leak is amplified by `StdioServerTransport` and `StdioClientTransport`, which both queue raw chunks through a `kotlinx.coroutines.channels.Channel<ByteArray>(Channel.UNLIMITED)` and then call `readBuffer.append(chunk)` without backpressure or size guard. This is a remote-pre-auth denial of service whenever an SDK stdio server's stdin is fed by an untrusted or attacker-controlled producer (for example: a host program that exec's the MCP server as a subprocess and pipes through bytes received from a network peer, or a sidecar wrapper that proxies bytes from an HTTP endpoint to the stdio transport). Version 0.13.0 fixes the issue.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.16.2 MediumCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Affected Products

ProductVersions
io.modelcontextprotocol:kotlin-sdkmodelcontextprotocol
  • < 0.13.0Affected
io.modelcontextprotocol:kotlin-sdk-clientmodelcontextprotocol
  • >= 0.7.0, < 0.13.0Affected
io.modelcontextprotocol:kotlin-sdk-coremodelcontextprotocol
  • < 0.13.0Affected
io.modelcontextprotocol:kotlin-sdk-servermodelcontextprotocol
  • >= 0.7.0, < 0.13.0Affected

References

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