CVE-2026-53937

Summary

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.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
modelcontextprotocolio.modelcontextprotocol:kotlin-sdk< 0.13.0affected
modelcontextprotocolio.modelcontextprotocol:kotlin-sdk-client>= 0.7.0, < 0.13.0affected
modelcontextprotocolio.modelcontextprotocol:kotlin-sdk-core< 0.13.0affected
modelcontextprotocolio.modelcontextprotocol:kotlin-sdk-server>= 0.7.0, < 0.13.0affected

Weaknesses

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

References