Intel

AIKIDO-2026-955118

cesanta.mongoose is vulnerable to HTTP Request Smuggling

HTTP Request SmugglingCVE-2026-73257 Published Aug 13, 2026

91

Critical Risk

This Affects:

C++cesanta.mongoose
7.2.0 - 7.21.0
Fixed in 7.22.0
Are you affected? Scan for Free

TL;DR

The built-in HTTP parser accepts requests that carry both Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding headers, which the HTTP specification says must be treated as an error. Mongoose honors the chunked encoding while a fronting proxy may use Content-Length, producing different request boundaries. An untrusted client can exploit this desync to smuggle a request that the proxy attributes to another connection. The fix rejects requests presenting both headers.

Who does this affect?

You are affected if you are using a version that falls within the vulnerable range and you run the built-in HTTP server behind a reverse proxy that can interpret request boundaries differently.

Background info

cesanta.mongoose is vulnerable to HTTP Request Smuggling in versions 7.2.0 - 7.21.0.

How to fix this

Upgrade the cesanta.mongoose library to the patch version.