Vulnerability in Netty

CVE-2026-59921

Netty is an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework. Prior to versions 4.1.136.Final and 4.2.16.Final, HttpPostRequestEncoder constructs multipart HTTP request bodies by directly concatenating user-supplied filenames and field names into Content-Disposition MIME headers without validating or sanitizing CRLF characters (\r\n). Since MIME headers are delimited by CRLF, an attacker who controls the filename can inject arbitrary MIME headers into the multipart body part. The root cause is that neither the encoder nor the FileUpload implementations' setFilename() methods, which only check for null, neutralize CRLF characters before the filename is embedded into the header. This issue has been fixed in versions 4.1.136.Final and 4.2.16.Final.

Vulnerability class: CRLF Injection

EPSS: 0.002 (15.9th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.7 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N.

Affected products

  • Netty — versions >= 4.2.0.Final, < 4.2.16.Final, >=4.2.0.Final, < 4.2.16.Final, < 4.1.136.Final

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-59921?
CVE-2026-59921 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Netty, classified under CRLF Injection. CVSS score: 5.7/10. Published 2026-07-28.
How severe is CVE-2026-59921?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.7 out of 10.