CVE-2021-32813: Drop Headers via Malicious Connection Header

Severity: high (CVSS 8.1 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2021-08-03 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-913

Description

Traefik is an HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer. Prior to version 2.4.13, there exists a potential header vulnerability in Traefik's handling of the Connection header. Active exploitation of this issue is unlikely, as it requires that a removed header would lead to a privilege escalation, however, the Traefik team has addressed this issue to prevent any potential abuse. If one has a chain of Traefik middlewares, and one of them sets a request header, then sending a request with a certain Connection header will cause it to be removed before the request is sent. In this case, the backend does not see the request header. A patch is available in version 2.4.13. There are no known workarounds aside from upgrading.

Affected products

Traefik: before 2.4.13 — fixed in 2.4.13

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Traefik 2.4.13. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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