CVE-2025-59139 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in hono. A fix is available for hono — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Hono has Body Limit Middleware Bypass
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2025-59139.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2025-59139 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 378,567 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
hononpmDescription
Hono is a Web application framework that provides support for any JavaScript runtime. In versions prior to 4.9.7, a flaw in the bodyLimit middleware could allow bypassing the configured request body size limit when conflicting HTTP headers were present. The middleware previously prioritized the Content-Length header even when a Transfer-Encoding: chunked header was also included. According to the HTTP specification, Content-Length must be ignored in such cases. This discrepancy could allow oversized request bodies to bypass the configured limit. Most standards-compliant runtimes and reverse proxies may reject such malformed requests with 400 Bad Request, so the practical impact depends on the runtime and deployment environment. If body size limits are used as a safeguard against large or malicious requests, this flaw could allow attackers to send oversized request bodies. The primary risk is denial of service (DoS) due to excessive memory or CPU consumption when handling very large requests. The implementation has been updated to align with the HTTP specification, ensuring that Transfer-Encoding takes precedence over Content-Length. The issue is fixed in Hono v4.9.7, and all users should upgrade immediately.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | hono | all versions | 4.9.7npm install hono@4.9.7 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for hono, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update hono to 4.9.7 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2025-59139 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2025-59139 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2025-59139. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2025-59139 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2025-59139 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.