Hono: ReDoS in CORS middleware via Access-Control-Request-Headers

Hono is a Web application framework that provides support for any JavaScript runtime. Prior to 4.12.34, the built-in CORS middleware, hono/cors, is vulnerable to a regular expression denial of service (ReDoS). During a preflight OPTIONS request, the middleware parses the attacker-controlled Access-Control-Request-Headers header using a whitespace-tolerant regular expression whose backtracking makes its running time quadratic in the input length. Because the header value is bounded only by the deployment's maximum HTTP header size, a single preflight carrying a long run of whitespace can consume seconds of CPU and block request processing. On runtimes that share one execution thread across requests, this stalls concurrent requests as well, and repeated requests can render the service unresponsive. This affects the default configuration, since the vulnerable path is reached whenever cors() is used with an unset or empty allowHeaders. Applications that set a non-empty allowHeaders are not affected. This issue is fixed in version 4.12.34.

Source published

7 Aug 2026 20:51:04 UTC

Source modified

10 Aug 2026 13:33:18 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

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CVSS 3.1 · 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L