CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-7238 — Netty Netty security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

Netty 4.1.43.Final allows HTTP Request Smuggling because it mishandles Transfer-Encoding whitespace (such as a [space]Transfer-Encoding:chunked line) and a later Content-Length header. This issue exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2019-16869.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-01-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-444

Affected products

  • netty / netty / 4.1.43
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 33
  • debian / debian_linux / 8.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0
  • redhat / jboss_enterprise_application_platform / 7.2

Showing 6 representative product identities from 10 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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