hyper is an open-source HTTP library for Rust (crates.io). In hyper from version 0.12.0 and before versions 0.13.10 and 0.14.3 there is a vulnerability that can enable a request smuggling attack. The HTTP server code had a flaw that incorrectly understands some requests with multiple transfer-encoding headers to have a chunked payload, when it should have been rejected as illegal. This combined with an upstream HTTP proxy that understands the request payload boundary differently can result in request smuggling or desync attacks. To determine if vulnerable, all these things must be true: 1) Using hyper as an HTTP server (the client is not affected), 2) Using HTTP/1.1 (HTTP/2 does not use transfer-encoding), 3) Using a vulnerable HTTP proxy upstream to hyper. If an upstream proxy correctly rejects the illegal transfer-encoding headers, the desync attack cannot succeed. If there is no proxy upstream of hyper, hyper cannot start the desync attack, as the client will repair the headers before forwarding. This is fixed in versions 0.14.3 and 0.13.10. As a workaround one can take the following options: 1) Reject requests that contain a transfer-encoding header, 2) Ensure any upstream proxy handles transfer-encoding correctly.
The product acts as an intermediary HTTP agent (such as a proxy or firewall) in the data flow between two entities such as a client and server, but it does not interpret malformed HTTP requests or responses in ways that are consistent with how the messages will be processed by those entities that are at the ultimate destination.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hyper | Hyper | 0.12.0 (including) | 0.13.10 (excluding) |
| Hyper | Hyper | 0.14.0 (including) | 0.14.3 (excluding) |
| Rust-hyper | Ubuntu | hirsute | * |
| Rust-hyper | Ubuntu | impish | * |
| Rust-hyper | Ubuntu | kinetic | * |
| Rust-hyper | Ubuntu | lunar | * |
| Rust-hyper | Ubuntu | mantic | * |
| Rust-hyper | Ubuntu | trusty | * |
HTTP requests or responses (“messages”) can be malformed or unexpected in ways that cause web servers or clients to interpret the messages in different ways than intermediary HTTP agents such as load balancers, reverse proxies, web caching proxies, application firewalls, etc. For example, an adversary may be able to add duplicate or different header fields that a client or server might interpret as one set of messages, whereas the intermediary might interpret the same sequence of bytes as a different set of messages. For example, discrepancies can arise in how to handle duplicate headers like two Transfer-encoding (TE) or two Content-length (CL), or the malicious HTTP message will have different headers for TE and CL. The inconsistent parsing and interpretation of messages can allow the adversary to “smuggle” a message to the client/server without the intermediary being aware of it. This weakness is usually the result of the usage of outdated or incompatible HTTP protocol versions in the HTTP agents.