Gunicorn fails to properly validate Transfer-Encoding headers, leading to HTTP Request Smuggling (HRS) vulnerabilities. By crafting requests with conflicting Transfer-Encoding headers, attackers can bypass security restrictions and access restricted endpoints. This issue is due to Gunicorns handling of Transfer-Encoding headers, where it incorrectly processes requests with multiple, conflicting Transfer-Encoding headers, treating them as chunked regardless of the final encoding specified. This vulnerability allows for a range of attacks including cache poisoning, session manipulation, and data exposure.
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.
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 This weakness is usually the result of the usage of outdated or incompatible HTTP protocol versions in the HTTP agents.