CVE-2013-4286 Apache Tomcat is vulnerable to HTTP request-smuggling

What is CVE-2013-4286?

CVE-2013-4286 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Apache Tomcat, published on 26 Feb 2014. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Apache Tomcat before 6.0.39, 7.x before 7.0.47, and 8.x before 8.0.0-RC3, when an HTTP connector or AJP connector is used, does not properly handle certain inconsistent HTTP request headers, which allows remote attackers to trigger incorrect identification of a request's length and conduct request-smuggling attacks via (1) multiple Content-Length headers or (2) a Content-Length header and a "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" header. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2005-2090.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2013-4286?

6 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.tomcat:tomcat. It affects 1 product.

Products include Apache Tomcat.

How do I fix CVE-2013-4286?

Upgrade org.apache.tomcat:tomcat to a fixed version for your release line: 6.0.39, 7.0.47 or 8.0.0-RC3.

Is CVE-2013-4286 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2013-4286 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Apache Tomcat

• CVE-2025-24813 Apache Tomcat Path Equivalence Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2016-8735 Apache Tomcat Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2017-12617 Apache Tomcat Remote Code Execution Exploited High 8.1
• CVE-2017-12615 Apache Tomcat on Windows Remote Code Execution Exploited High 8.1
• CVE-2026-34486 Apache Tomcat Missing Encryption of Sensitive Data Exploited High 7.5

All Apache Tomcat vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as CVE-2014-4286, GHSA-j448-j653-r3vj.