CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-16869 — Netty Netty security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

Netty before 4.1.42.Final mishandles whitespace before the colon in HTTP headers (such as a "Transfer-Encoding : chunked" line), which leads to HTTP request smuggling.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2019-09-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-444

Affected products

  • netty / netty
  • debian / debian_linux / 8.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04
  • redhat / jboss_enterprise_application_platform / 7.2

Showing 6 representative product identities from 8 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

HTTP request smuggling and message-boundary ambiguity

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Check exposure

  • Inventory every proxy, CDN, gateway, load balancer, service mesh, and application server hop on affected request paths.
  • Compare documented parsing and normalization behavior for message length, transfer coding, duplicate headers, and protocol translation.
  • Identify connection reuse and which downstream services trust headers added by intermediaries.

Remediate safely

  • Update affected intermediaries and origin servers and align them on a single standards-compliant request framing policy.
  • Reject ambiguous length, transfer-coding, duplicate, malformed, and unsupported framing before forwarding.
  • Normalize or remove hop-by-hop and identity headers at one controlled boundary and add multi-hop regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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