CVE-2026-1527

Impact

When an application passes user-controlled input to the upgrade option of client.request(), an attacker can inject CRLF sequences (\r\n) to:

1. Inject arbitrary HTTP headers
2. Terminate the HTTP request prematurely and smuggle raw data to non-HTTP services (Redis, Memcached, Elasticsearch)

The vulnerability exists because undici writes the upgrade value directly to the socket without validating for invalid header characters:

// lib/dispatcher/client-h1.js:1121
if (upgrade) {
  header += `connection: upgrade\r\nupgrade: ${upgrade}\r\n`
}

Patches

Patched in the undici version v7.24.0 and v6.24.0. Users should upgrade to this version or later.

Workarounds

Sanitize the upgrade option string before passing to undici:

function sanitizeUpgrade(value) {
  if (/[\r\n]/.test(value)) {
    throw new Error('Invalid upgrade value')
  }
  return value
}

client.request({
  upgrade: sanitizeUpgrade(userInput)
})