Vulnerabilities > CVE-2020-26281 - HTTP Request Smuggling vulnerability in Rust-Lang Async-H1
Summary
async-h1 is an asynchronous HTTP/1.1 parser for Rust (crates.io). There is a request smuggling vulnerability in async-h1 before version 2.3.0. This vulnerability affects any webserver that uses async-h1 behind a reverse proxy, including all such Tide applications. If the server does not read the body of a request which is longer than some buffer length, async-h1 will attempt to read a subsequent request from the body content starting at that offset into the body. One way to exploit this vulnerability would be for an adversary to craft a request such that the body contains a request that would not be noticed by a reverse proxy, allowing it to forge forwarded/x-forwarded headers. If an application trusted the authenticity of these headers, it could be misled by the smuggled request. Another potential concern with this vulnerability is that if a reverse proxy is sending multiple http clients' requests along the same keep-alive connection, it would be possible for the smuggled request to specify a long content and capture another user's request in its body. This content could be captured in a post request to an endpoint that allows the content to be subsequently retrieved by the adversary. This has been addressed in async-h1 2.3.0 and previous versions have been yanked.
Vulnerable Configurations
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- HTTP Request Splitting HTTP Request Splitting (also known as HTTP Request Smuggling) is an attack pattern where an attacker attempts to insert additional HTTP requests in the body of the original (enveloping) HTTP request in such a way that the browser interprets it as one request but the web server interprets it as two. There are several ways to perform HTTP request splitting attacks. One way is to include double Content-Length headers in the request to exploit the fact that the devices parsing the request may each use a different header. Another way is to submit an HTTP request with a "Transfer Encoding: chunked" in the request header set with setRequestHeader to allow a payload in the HTTP Request that can be considered as another HTTP Request by a subsequent parsing entity. A third way is to use the "Double CR in an HTTP header" technique. There are also a few less general techniques targeting specific parsing vulnerabilities in certain web servers.
- HTTP Request Smuggling HTTP Request Smuggling results from the discrepancies in parsing HTTP requests between HTTP entities such as web caching proxies or application firewalls. Entities such as web servers, web caching proxies, application firewalls or simple proxies often parse HTTP requests in slightly different ways. Under specific situations where there are two or more such entities in the path of the HTTP request, a specially crafted request is seen by two attacked entities as two different sets of requests. This allows certain requests to be smuggled through to a second entity without the first one realizing it.