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CVE-2021-43797 Moderate

HTTP request smuggling in netty

### Impact Netty currently just skips control chars when these are present at the beginning / end of the header name. We should better fail fast as these are not allowed by the spec and could lead to HTTP request smuggling. Failing to do the validation might cause netty to "sanitize" header names before it forward these to another remote system when used as proxy. This remote system can't see the invalid usage anymore and so not do the validation itself.

Exploit probability 2.7%
Published December 9, 2021
Required by Not available
Last source change July 8, 2026

02 / AFFECTED SOFTWARE

Affected packages

Maven io.netty:netty

71 explicit affected versions

Maven io.netty:netty-codec-http

144 explicit affected versions

Maven org.jboss.netty:netty

39 explicit affected versions

Unknown Unknown

122 explicit affected versions

03 / CONNECTIONS

Connected vulnerabilities

04 / EVIDENCE

Source records

Open Source Vulnerabilities GHSA-wx5j-54mm-rqqq

### Impact Netty currently just skips control chars when these are present at the beginning / end of the header name. We should better fail fast as these are not allowed by the spec and could lead to HTTP request smuggling. Failing to do the validation might cause netty to "sanitize" header names before it forward these to another remote system when used as proxy. This remote system can't see the invalid usage anymore and so not do the validation itself.

View original source
Open Source Vulnerabilities CVE-2021-43797

Netty is an asynchronous event-driven network application framework for rapid development of maintainable high performance protocol servers & clients. Netty prior to version 4.1.71.Final skips control chars when they are present at the beginning / end of the header name. It should instead fail fast as these are not allowed by the spec and could lead to HTTP request smuggling. Failing to do the validation might cause netty to "sanitize" header names before it forward these to another remote system when used as proxy. This remote system can't see the invalid usage anymore, and therefore does not do the validation itself. Users should upgrade to version 4.1.71.Final.

View original source

05 / REFERENCES

Further evidence