VulnerabilityModified

CVE-2026-42581

An attacker that sends an HTTP/1.0 request with both headers causes Netty to decode the body as chunked while leaving Content-Length intact in the forwarded HttpMessage.

CRITICAL 9.8EPSS 0.63%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.63%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

Netty is an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework. Prior to 4.2.13.Final and 4.1.133.Final, HttpObjectDecoder strips a conflicting Content-Length header when a request carries both Transfer-Encoding: chunked and Content-Length, but only for HTTP/1.1 messages. The guard is absent for HTTP/1.0. An attacker that sends an HTTP/1.0 request with both headers causes Netty to decode the body as chunked while leaving Content-Length intact in the forwarded HttpMessage. Any downstream proxy or handler that trusts Content-Length over Transfer-Encoding will disagree on message boundaries, enabling request smuggling. This vulnerability is fixed in 4.2.13.Final and 4.1.133.Final.

CVSS 3.1: 9.8 CRITICALCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS: 0.63% probability · 48th percentile
CISA KEV: Not listed
Weakness: CWE-444
Affected: netty/netty
Source: security-advisories@github.com

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.