CVE-2026-2835: Pingora has HTTP Request Smuggling via HTTP/1.0 and Transfer-Encoding Misparsing

Should you act?

Critical and remotely reachable

No known exploitation yet, but it is network-reachable without credentials. This signal is computed from CISA KEV, EPSS and CVSS data; it is not an editorial verdict.

• No confirmed exploitation. It is not in CISA’s KEV catalog and CISA’s SSVC assessment records no known exploitation. That can change quickly after a public write-up; re-check if you are affected.
• EPSS 0.6%, percentile 48: FIRST’s model estimates a 0.6% chance of exploitation activity in the next 30 days, higher than 48% of all scored CVEs (low). EPSS is a probability, not a verdict.
• Remotely reachable with no login and no user interaction. If the vulnerable service is exposed to the internet, prioritize it.
• Only applies if your dependency tree includes pingora-core (crates.io (Rust)) <= 0.7.0, fixed in 0.8.0. Check your lockfile, including transitive dependencies.

What it is

An HTTP Request Smuggling vulnerability (CWE-444) has been found in Pingora's parsing of HTTP/1.0 and Transfer-Encoding requests. The issue occurs due to improperly allowing HTTP/1.0 request bodies to be close-delimited and incorrect handling of multiple Transfer-Encoding values, allowing attackers to send HTTP/1.0 requests in a way that would desync Pingora’s request framing from backend servers’. Impact This vulnerability primarily affects standalone Pingora deployments in front of certain backends that accept HTTP/1.0 requests. An attacker could craft a malicious payload following this request that Pingora forwards to the backend in order to: Bypass proxy-level ACL controls and WAF logic Poison caches and upstream connections, causing subsequent requests from legitimate users to receive responses intended for smuggled requests Perform cross-user attacks by hijacking sessions or smuggling requests that appear to originate from the trusted proxy IP Cloudflare's CDN infrastructure was not affected by this vulnerability, as its ingress proxy layers forwarded HTTP/1.1 requests only, rejected ambiguous framing such as invalid Content-Length values, and forwarded a single Transfer-Encoding: chunked header for chunked requests. Mitigation: Pingora users should upgrade to Pingora v0.8.0 or higher that fixes this issue by correctly parsing message length headers per RFC 9112 and strictly adhering to more RFC guidelines, including that HTTP request bodies are never close-delimited. As a workaround, users can reject certain requests with an error in the request filter logic in order to stop processing bytes on the connection and disable downstream connection reuse. The user should reject any non-HTTP/1.1 request, or a request that has invalid Content-Length, multiple Transfer-Encoding headers, or Transfer-Encoding header that is not an exact “chunked” string match.

From the GitHub advisory

Impact Pingora versions prior to 0.8.0 improperly allowed HTTP/1.0 request bodies to be close-delimited and incorrectly handled multiple Transfer-Encoding values. This allows an attacker to desync Pingora's request framing from backend servers and smuggle requests to the backend.

This vulnerability primarily affects standalone Pingora deployments in front of certain backends that accept HTTP/1.0 requests. An attacker could exploit this to bypass proxy-level ACL controls and WAF logic, poison caches and upstream connections, or perform cross-user attacks by hijacking sessions.

Note: Cloudflare customers and Cloudflare's CDN infrastructure were not affected by this vulnerability, as its ingress proxy layers rejected ambiguous framing such as invalid Content-Length values and internally forwarded non-ambiguous message length framing headers.

Patches Pingora users should upgrade to Pingora v0.8.0 or higher that fixes this issue by correctly parsing message length headers per RFC 9112 and strictly adhering to more RFC guidelines, including that HTTP request bodies are never close-delimited (commits 7f7166d62fa916b9f11b2eb8f9e3c4999e8b9023, 40c3c1e9a43a86b38adeab8da7a2f6eba68b83ad, and 87e2e2fb37edf9be33e3b1d04726293ae6bf2052).

Workarounds As a workaround, users can reject certain requests with an error in the request filter logic in order to stop processing bytes on the connection and disable downstream connection reuse. The user should reject any non-HTTP/1.1 request, or a request that has invalid Content-Length, multiple Transfer-Encoding headers, or Transfer-Encoding header that is not an exact “chunked” string match.

Weakness type: CWE-444.

Product: pingora-core (crates.io (Rust)) · Assigned by: cloudflare · Published: 2026-03-04

Affected and fixed versions

Severity scores

• Attack vector: network (remotely reachable)
• Attack complexity: low
• Attack requirements: none
• Privileges required: none (no login)
• User interaction: none

CVSS measures how bad a flaw is if exploited, not how likely exploitation is. Read it next to the exploitation data below.

Exploitation and urgency

• CISA KEV: not listed (no confirmed in-the-wild exploitation known to CISA).
• CISA SSVC assessment: exploitation none, automatable yes, technical impact partial.
• FIRST EPSS (model of 2026-10-21): 0.60% probability of exploitation activity in the next 30 days; percentile 48.

Timeline

• 2026-03-04 — CVE record published by cloudflare
• 2026-03-05 — GitHub-reviewed advisory GHSA-hj7x-879w-vrp7 published (critical)
• 2026-03-06 — CVE record last updated

Sources and references

Original sources first. Version and fix details should always be confirmed against the vendor or project advisory.

Vulnerability records

1. GitHub Advisory GHSA-hj7x-879w-vrp7 github.com
2. CVE.org record CVE-2026-2835 cve.org
3. NVD entry CVE-2026-2835 nvd.nist.gov

Other references from the CVE record and advisory

1. github.com github.com
2. github.com github.com
3. rustsec.org rustsec.org

Critical crates.io (Rust) advisories · Today’s Security Digest