An HTTP Request Smuggling vulnerability (CWE-444) has been found in Pingoras parsing of HTTP/1.0 and Transfer-Encoding requests. The issue occurs due to improperly allowing HTTP/1.0 request bodies to be close-delimited and incorrect handling of multiple Transfer-Encoding values, allowing attackers to send HTTP/1.0 requests in a way that would desync Pingora’s request framing from backend servers’.
Impact
This vulnerability primarily affects standalone Pingora deployments in front of certain backends that accept HTTP/1.0 requests. An attacker could craft a malicious payload following this request that Pingora forwards to the backend in order to:
Bypass proxy-level ACL controls and WAF logic
Poison caches and upstream connections, causing subsequent requests from legitimate users to receive responses intended for smuggled requests
Perform cross-user attacks by hijacking sessions or smuggling requests that appear to originate from the trusted proxy IP
Cloudflares CDN infrastructure was not affected by this vulnerability, as its ingress proxy layers forwarded HTTP/1.1 requests only, rejected ambiguous framing such as invalid Content-Length values, and forwarded a single Transfer-Encoding: chunked header for chunked requests.
Mitigation:
Pingora users should upgrade to Pingora v0.8.0 or higher that fixes this issue by correctly parsing message length headers per RFC 9112 and strictly adhering to more RFC guidelines, including that HTTP request bodies are never close-delimited.
As a workaround, users can reject certain requests with an error in the request filter logic in order to stop processing bytes on the connection and disable downstream connection reuse. The user should reject any non-HTTP/1.1 request, or a request that has invalid Content-Length, multiple Transfer-Encoding headers, or Transfer-Encoding header that is not an exact “chunked” string match.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pingora | Cloudflare | * | 0.8.0 (excluding) |
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.