0.0
NA
CVE-2026-28970
SwiftNIO HTTP Request Smuggling and Response Splitting Vulnerability
Description

Programs using swift-nio is vulnerable to HTTP request smuggling and HTTP response splitting attacks, caused by insufficient validation of outbound HTTP/1.1 request and response start line components. This vulnerability affects all swift-nio versions from 2.0.0 to 2.99.0. It is fixed in 2.100.0 and later releases. This vulnerability is caused by the `NIOHTTPRequestHeadersValidator` and `NIOHTTPResponseHeadersValidator` channel handlers only validating header field names and values, while leaving the request URI, request method, and response reason phrase unvalidated. An attacker who can influence the content of these fields — for example by controlling a URL path or a custom HTTP method in a proxy application — can inject CR/LF sequences or other control characters into the HTTP start line. This allows construction of arbitrary additional HTTP requests or responses on the wire, a classic HTTP request smuggling or HTTP response splitting attack. Exploiting this vulnerability requires the attacker to influence the content of outbound HTTP start line fields. In proxy applications that forward attacker-controlled URIs or methods, this is straightforward. For clients, a malicious server that triggers a redirect to a crafted URL could exploit the URI validation gap. For servers, any client that can cause the server to emit a crafted response reason phrase could exploit the response splitting gap. In vulnerable applications, where attacker controlled data is supplied to these fields, the attack is low-effort: injecting a CRLF sequence into a URI or reason phrase requires only a single crafted request. Successful exploitation can allow an attacker to smuggle additional HTTP requests past intermediaries or split HTTP responses, potentially bypassing WAFs or poisoning web caches. However, most applications are not vulnerable at all. The risk can be mitigated by ensuring that all user-controlled input is sanitized before being used in HTTP start line components. However, this mitigation places the burden on application developers and is error-prone. The issue is fixed by extending `NIOHTTPRequestHeadersValidator` to validate request URIs against the character set defined in RFC 9112 Section 3.2 and RFC 3986 Section 3, and to validate custom HTTP methods against the token grammar defined in RFC 9110. `NIOHTTPResponseHeadersValidator` is extended to validate custom response reason phrases against RFC 9112 Section 4. Applications that use these validator channel handlers — which are installed by default when using `addHTTPClientHandlers()` or `addHTTPServerHandlers()` — will reject invalid outbound messages with an HTTPParserError.invalidHeaderToken error rather than emitting them to the network. SwiftNIO is grateful to @kuranikaran and @YLChen-007 for their reporting and assistance with the project's process.

INFO

Published Date :

June 12, 2026, 3:07 p.m.

Last Modified :

June 12, 2026, 3:07 p.m.

Remotely Exploit :

No

Source :

github-security-advisories
Affected Products

The following products are affected by CVE-2026-28970 vulnerability. Even if cvefeed.io is aware of the exact versions of the products that are affected, the information is not represented in the table below.

ID Vendor Product Action
1 Apple swiftnio
Solution
Update swift-nio to a version that validates HTTP start line components and rejects invalid messages.
  • Update swift-nio to version 2.100.0 or later.
  • Ensure HTTP start line components are validated.
  • Reject invalid outbound messages.
  • Sanitize user-controlled input for HTTP start lines.
References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

Here, you will find a curated list of external links that provide in-depth information, practical solutions, and valuable tools related to CVE-2026-28970.

URL Resource
https://github.com/apple/swift-nio/security/advisories/GHSA-cq87-8r7h-962v
https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-cq87-8r7h-962v
CWE - Common Weakness Enumeration

While CVE identifies specific instances of vulnerabilities, CWE categorizes the common flaws or weaknesses that can lead to vulnerabilities. CVE-2026-28970 is associated with the following CWEs:

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC) stores attack patterns, which are descriptions of the common attributes and approaches employed by adversaries to exploit the CVE-2026-28970 weaknesses.

We scan GitHub repositories to detect new proof-of-concept exploits. Following list is a collection of public exploits and proof-of-concepts, which have been published on GitHub (sorted by the most recently updated).

Results are limited to the first 15 repositories due to potential performance issues.

The following list is the news that have been mention CVE-2026-28970 vulnerability anywhere in the article.

EPSS is a daily estimate of the probability of exploitation activity being observed over the next 30 days. Following chart shows the EPSS score history of the vulnerability.