High

h3 v1 has Request Smuggling (TE.TE) issue

  • Disclosed: 15.01.2026
  • Updated: 11.10.2026 10:22

I was digging into h3 v1 (specifically v1.15.4) and found a critical HTTP Request Smuggling vulnerability.

Basically, readRawBody is doing a strict case-sensitive check for the Transfer-Encoding header. It explicitly looks for "chunked", but per the RFC, this header should be case-insensitive.

The Bug: If I send a request with Transfer-Encoding: ChuNked (mixed case), h3 misses it. Since it doesn't see "chunked" and there's no Content-Length, it assumes the body is empty and processes the request immediately.

This leaves the actual body sitting on the socket, which triggers a classic TE.TE Desync (Request Smuggling) if the app is running behind a Layer 4 proxy or anything that doesn't normalize headers (like AWS NLB or Node proxies).

Vulnerable Code (src/utils/body.ts):

js
if (
    !Number.parseInt(event.node.req.headers["content-length"] || "") &&
    !String(event.node.req.headers["transfer-encoding"] ?? "")
      .split(",")
      .map((e) => e.trim())
      .filter(Boolean)
      .includes("chunked") // <--- This is the issue. "ChuNkEd" returns false here.
  ) {
    return Promise.resolve(undefined);
  }

I verified this locally:

  • Sent a Transfer-Encoding: ChunKed request without a closing 0 chunk.
  • Express hangs (correctly waiting for data).
  • h3 responds immediately (vulnerable, thinks body is length 0).

Impact: Since H3/Nuxt/Nitro is often used in containerized setups behind TCP load balancers, an attacker can use this to smuggle requests past WAFs or desynchronize the socket to poison other users' connections.

Fix: Just need to normalize the header value before checking: .map((e) => e.trim().toLowerCase())

Affected software

Click a technology to see all vulnerabilities affecting it.

PlatformPackageVulnerable versionsFixed in
npm package h3 < 1.15.5 1.15.5

References

CVSS score 8.9/10
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:L
Weakness (CWE)
CWE-444
Platform
npm
Package
h3
Disclosed
15.01.2026
Updated
11.10.2026 10:22

Sources and licenses

OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - GHSA-mp2g-9vg9-f4cg - CC BY 4.0

Vulnerability history: h3

All published vulnerabilities of this package (npm package), newest first. Shows whether this is a one-off slip or a package that needs watching.

All (10) in the archive
Total entries
10
First → latest
01.2026 03.2026
Without a fix
0
Exploited in attacks
0

Severity breakdown

  • High 3
  • Medium 6
  • Low 1

Disclosures per year

  1. 2026: 10
Severity:
  1. High · 7.4 CVE-2026-33131 >= 2.0.0-0, < 2.0.1-rc.15 2.0.1-rc.15
  2. High · 7.5 CVE-2026-33128 >= 2.0.0, < 2.0.1-rc.15, < 1.15.6 2.0.1-rc.15, 1.15.6
  3. h3 v1 has Request Smuggling (TE.TE) issue this entry
    High · 8.9 CVE-2026-23527 < 1.15.5 1.15.5

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