Cyber Resilience

CVE-2021-21295

Medium

Published: 09 March 2021

Published
09 March 2021
Modified
21 November 2024
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 5.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
EPSS Score 0.0061 70.2th percentile
Risk Priority 12 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2021-21295 is a medium-severity HTTP Request/Response Smuggling (CWE-444) vulnerability in Netty Netty. Its CVSS base score is 5.9 (Medium).

Operationally, ranked in the top 29.8% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

Netty is an open-source, asynchronous event-driven network application framework for rapid development of maintainable high performance protocol servers & clients. In Netty (io.netty:netty-codec-http2) before version 4.1.60.Final there is a vulnerability that enables request smuggling. If a Content-Length header is present…

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in the original HTTP/2 request, the field is not validated by `Http2MultiplexHandler` as it is propagated up. This is fine as long as the request is not proxied through as HTTP/1.1. If the request comes in as an HTTP/2 stream, gets converted into the HTTP/1.1 domain objects (`HttpRequest`, `HttpContent`, etc.) via `Http2StreamFrameToHttpObjectCodec `and then sent up to the child channel's pipeline and proxied through a remote peer as HTTP/1.1 this may result in request smuggling. In a proxy case, users may assume the content-length is validated somehow, which is not the case. If the request is forwarded to a backend channel that is a HTTP/1.1 connection, the Content-Length now has meaning and needs to be checked. An attacker can smuggle requests inside the body as it gets downgraded from HTTP/2 to HTTP/1.1. For an example attack refer to the linked GitHub Advisory. Users are only affected if all of this is true: `HTTP2MultiplexCodec` or `Http2FrameCodec` is used, `Http2StreamFrameToHttpObjectCodec` is used to convert to HTTP/1.1 objects, and these HTTP/1.1 objects are forwarded to another remote peer. This has been patched in 4.1.60.Final As a workaround, the user can do the validation by themselves by implementing a custom `ChannelInboundHandler` that is put in the `ChannelPipeline` behind `Http2StreamFrameToHttpObjectCodec`.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

netty
netty
≤ 4.1.60
netapp
oncommand api services
all versions
netapp
oncommand workflow automation
all versions
debian
debian linux
10.0
quarkus
quarkus
≤ 1.13.7
apache
kudu
≤ 1.16.0
apache
zookeeper
3.5.9
oracle
communications cloud native core policy
1.14.0

Mitigating Controls

No mitigating controls mapped yet. The per-CVE control annotator has not reached this CVE.

References