CVE-2026-43969 – Cookie Request Header Injection via Unvalidated Encoder in cow_cookie:cookie/1

CVE ID :CVE-2026-43969

Published : May 11, 2026, 7:16 p.m. | 43 minutes ago

Description :Improper Neutralization of CRLF Sequences (‘CRLF Injection’) vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows HTTP request splitting and cookie smuggling via unvalidated cookie name and value fields.

cow_cookie:cookie/1 in cowlib builds a client-side Cookie: request header from a list of name-value pairs without validating either field. An attacker who controls the cookie names or values passed to this function can inject ;, ,, CR, LF, or TAB characters into the serialized header. This enables two classes of attack: cookie smuggling within a single header (e.g. injecting “; admin=1” to introduce a phantom cookie that the receiving server treats as authentic) and HTTP request header splitting (injecting CRLF to append arbitrary headers or smuggle a complete second request against a shared upstream proxy). The decoder side (parse_cookie_name/1, parse_cookie_value/1) and setcookie/3 already validate and reject these characters; the encoder alone is missing the check.

This issue affects cowlib from 2.9.0.

Severity: 2.1 | LOW

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