Akamai Ghost on Akamai CDN edge servers before 2025-11-17 has a chunked request body processing error that can result in HTTP request smuggling. When Akamai Ghost receives an invalid chunked body that includes a chunk size different from the actual size of the following chunk data, under certain circumstances, Akamai Ghost erroneously forwards the invalid request and subsequent superfluous bytes to the origin server. An attacker could hide a smuggled request in these superfluous bytes. Whether this is exploitable depends on the origin servers behavior and how it processes the invalid request it receives from Akamai Ghost.
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 This weakness is usually the result of the usage of outdated or incompatible HTTP protocol versions in the HTTP agents.