CVE-2026-40561

Description

Starlet versions through 0.31 for Perl allows HTTP Request Smuggling via Improper Header Precedence. Starlet incorrectly prioritizes "Content-Length" over "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" when both headers are present in an HTTP request. Per RFC 7230 3.3.3, Transfer-Encoding must take precedence. An attacker could exploit this to smuggle malicious HTTP requests via a front-end reverse proxy.

References

• https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7230#section-3.3.3
• https://github.com/kazuho/Starlet/commit/a7d5dfd1862aafa43e5eaca0fdb6acf4cc15b2d0.patch
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/05/03/1