critical · 9.1 Patched

h11 accepts some malformed Chunked-Encoding bodies

CVE-2025-43859 · GHSA-vqfr-h8mv-ghfj · PYSEC-2026-348 · published 24 Apr 2025

How serious is it

  • Severity: critical, CVSS score 9.1 out of 10.
  • No exploit prediction (EPSS) score yet.
  • Not on the CISA list of exploited vulnerabilities.
  • No public exploit in Exploit-DB.

Is your app affected by CVE-2025-43859?

Paste this prompt into Claude Code, Cursor or any AI coding tool: it runs a free Shippable scan of your project and fixes what it finds. Built with Lovable, Bolt or v0? Scan your live app. Or upload your package file.

Who is affected

  • h11 (PyPI) < 0.16.0

How to check

  1. Run pip show h11 in your project to see the installed version, including copies pulled in by other packages.
  2. Or paste your lockfile into the checker: it lists every package with a known vulnerability, this one included.
  3. Or run npx shippable-dev scan localhost:3000 in your project folder. It reads your lockfile and flags this vulnerability along with every other known one.

How to fix

Copies a prompt for Claude Code, Cursor or Codex: it checks your lockfiles for this and upgrades it.
  1. Upgrade h11 to 0.16.0 or later, commit the lockfile and redeploy.
  2. If a vulnerable version was live, check your logs and rotate the secrets that server could read.

The advisory

### Impact A leniency in h11's parsing of line terminators in chunked-coding message bodies can lead to request smuggling vulnerabilities under certain conditions. ### Details HTTP/1.1 Chunked-Encoding bodies are formatted as a sequence of "chunks", each of which consists of: - chunk length - `\r\n` - `length` bytes of content - `\r\n` In versions of h11 up to 0.14.0, h11 instead parsed them as: - chunk length - `\r\n` - `length` bytes of content - any two bytes i.e. it did not validate that the trailing `\r\n` bytes were correct, and if you put 2 bytes of garbage there it would be accepted, instead of correctly rejecting the body as malformed. By itself this is harmless. However, suppose you have a proxy or reverse-proxy that tries to analyze HTTP requests, and your proxy has a _different_ bug in parsing Chunked-Encoding, acting as if the format is: - chunk length - `\r\n` - `length` bytes of content - more bytes of content, as many as it takes until you find a `\r\n` For example, [pound](https://github.com/graygnuorg/pound/pull/43) had this bug -- it can happen if an implementer uses a generic "read until end of line" helper to consumes the trailing `\r\n`. In this case, h11 and your proxy may both accept the same stream of bytes, but interpret them differently. For example, consider the following HTTP request(s) (assume all line breaks are `\r\n`): ``` GET /one HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost Transfer-Encoding: chunked 5 AAAAAXX2 45 0 GET /two HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost Transfer-Encoding: chunked 0 ``` Here h11 will interpret it as two requests, one with body `AAAAA45` and one with an empty body, while our hypothetical buggy proxy will interpret it as a single request, with body `AAAAXX20\r\n\r\nGET /two ...`. And any time two HTTP processors both accept the same string of bytes but interpret them differently, you have the conditions for a "request smuggling" attack. For example, if `/two` is a dangerous endpoint and the job of the reverse proxy is to stop requests from getting there, then an attacker could use a bytestream like the above to circumvent this protection. Even worse, if our buggy reverse proxy receives two requests from different users: ``` GET /one HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost Transfer-Encoding: chunked 5 AAAAAXX999 0 ``` ``` GET /two HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost Cookie: SESSION_KEY=abcdef... ``` ...it will consider the first request to be complete and valid, and send both on to the h11-based web server over the same socket. The server will then see the two concatenated requests, and interpret them as _one_ request to `/one` whose body includes `/two`'s session key, potentially allowing one user to steal another's credentials. ### Patches Fixed in h11 0.15.0. ### Workarounds Since exploitation requires the combination of buggy h11 with a buggy (reverse) proxy, fixing either component is sufficient to mitigate this issue. ### Credits Reported by Jeppe Bonde Weikop on 2025-01-09.

Check your whole app

Dependencies are only half of it. Free and read-only: before you push, run npx shippable-dev scan localhost:3000 in your project folder, no account needed. For your live app, you prove it's yours with a one-line tag first.

References

Merged from GitHub Advisory Database, OSV. Last updated 28 Oct 2026. All vulnerabilities · RSS · JSON