GHSA-mp2g-9vg9-f4cg is a high-severity (CVSS 8.9) CWE-444 vulnerability in h3. A fix is available for h3 — see the affected versions and patch details below.
h3 v1 has Request Smuggling (TE.TE) issue
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- 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 GHSA-mp2g-9vg9-f4cg.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-mp2g-9vg9-f4cg by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 379,842 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
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.
h3npmDescription
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):
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: ChunKedrequest 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 Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | h3 | all versions | 1.15.5npm install h3@1.15.5 |
Affected Products
h3h3Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for h3, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update h3 to 1.15.5 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-mp2g-9vg9-f4cg 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.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
This vulnerability is rated Important for Red Hat products as it affects the h3 HTTP framework, which is used in Fedora 42 and 43. A remote attacker can exploit this flaw by sending a specially crafted HTTP request with a case-variant `Transfer-Encoding` header, leading to HTTP Request Smuggling. This can enable…
Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.Source: Red Hat security advisory for GHSA-mp2g-9vg9-f4cg (CC BY 4.0)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-mp2g-9vg9-f4cg in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.