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HIGH8.9

GHSA-mp2g-9vg9-f4cg

h3 v1 has Request Smuggling (TE.TE) issue

Quick fix

GHSA-mp2g-9vg9-f4cg — h3: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

npm install h3@1.15.5

Details

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())`

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

npm/h3
Introduced in: 0Fixed in: 1.15.5
Fixnpm install h3@1.15.5

References