CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-20220 — A flaw was found in Undertow

Medium CVSS 5.8

A flaw was found in Undertow. A regression in the fix for CVE-2020-10687 was found. HTTP request smuggling related to CVE-2017-2666 is possible against HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2 due to permitting invalid characters in an HTTP request. This flaw allows an attacker to poison a web-cache, perform an XSS attack, or obtain sensitive information from request other than their own. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.8 (2.0)
Published
2021-02-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-444

Affected products

  • redhat / undertow
  • netapp / active_iq_unified_manager
  • netapp / oncommand_workflow_automation

Showing 3 representative product identities from 6 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

HTTP request smuggling and message-boundary ambiguity

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.