CVE-2026-14643
undici's cache interceptor mishandles optional whitespace placed around the equals sign of a qualified no-cache or private Cache-Control directive. In undici from 7.0.0 up to before 7.29.0 and from 8.0.0 up to before 8.9.0, the parser either drops the directive or stores a field name with literal quote characters, so the cache decision fails to recognize the qualification and the response is stored. In shared-cache mode, this lets a response containing one user's authenticated data be served from cache to a later caller, including an unauthenticated one, when both requests resolve to the same cache key. It affects applications that enable the cache interceptor in shared mode, forward Authorization headers upstream, and receive cacheable responses with qualified directives padded with whitespace around the equals sign. This is the whitespace-around-equals variant that the fix for CVE-2026-9678 did not normalize, and it is fixed in undici 7.29.0 and 8.9.0.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can read sensitive data.
- Weakness
- Two components read the same data differently, so a check on one side does not protect the other.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doFold into the next patch cycle. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.