Req vulnerable to multipart form-data header injection via unescaped name/filename/content_type
🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)
📋 Description
Summary
Req's multipart form encoder interpolates the per-part name, filename, and content_type directly into the part headers without escaping. An attacker who can influence any of those values can inject CRLF-separated header lines, smuggle additional form fields, or prepend a whole extra part into the request the victim service sends downstream.
Details
Req.Utils.encode_form_part/2 in lib/req/utils.ex builds the per-part header iodata by concatenating the three caller-supplied strings verbatim into content-disposition: form-data; name="<name>"; filename="<filename>" and content-type: <content_type>. There is no CRLF stripping, no quote escaping, and no validation. A value containing "\r\n closes the surrounding quoted value and starts a new header line; an additional \r\n--<boundary> terminates the current part and lets the attacker prepend a smuggled part.
The flaw is reachable through every supported way of supplying a part. It is especially easy to hit when value is a %File.Stream{}, because filename then defaults to Path.basename(stream.path) and POSIX filenames may legitimately contain \r and \n. RFC 7578 / WHATWG form-data requires percent-encoding ", CR, and LF in these fields; the fix adopts that behavior.
PoC
- Construct a malicious
filenamesuch asharmless.txt"\r\nX-Smuggled: marker\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="pwned. - Call
Req.post!(url, form_multipart: [upload: {"benign body", filename: <malicious>, content_type: "text/plain"}]). - The emitted multipart body contains a real
X-Smuggled:header line and an extraContent-Dispositionforname="pwned", alongside Req's legitimate headers.
Impact
HTTP request smuggling / multipart parameter smuggling in the HTTP client. Any application using Req to send form_multipart requests where any of name, filename, or content_type can be influenced by an untrusted source is affected, most commonly upload proxies and re-uploaders that derive filename from Path.basename/1 on a user-controlled path.
🎯 Affected products1
- erlang/req:>= 0.5.3, < 0.6.0
🔗 References (7)
- https://github.com/wojtekmach/req/security/advisories/GHSA-px9f-whj3-246m
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-49756
- https://github.com/wojtekmach/req/commit/74506ff2c5addf74df85d79dc726e9b2e264a8ba
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-49756.html
- https://github.com/wojtekmach/req/releases/tag/v0.6.0
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-49756
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-px9f-whj3-246m