CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-46137

Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests ('HTTP Request/Response Smuggling')

Published: Oct 25, 2023 | Modified: Nov 02, 2023
CVSS 3.x
5.3
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Twisted is an event-based framework for internet applications. Prior to version 23.10.0rc1, when sending multiple HTTP requests in one TCP packet, twisted.web will process the requests asynchronously without guaranteeing the response order. If one of the endpoints is controlled by an attacker, the attacker can delay the response on purpose to manipulate the response of the second request when a victim launched two requests using HTTP pipeline. Version 23.10.0rc1 contains a patch for this issue.

Weakness

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.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Twisted Twistedmatrix * 22.8.0 (including)

Extended Description

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 This weakness is usually the result of the usage of outdated or incompatible HTTP protocol versions in the HTTP agents.

Potential Mitigations

References