Vulnerabilities > CVE-2021-41084 - Injection vulnerability in Typelevel Http4S
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
NONE Integrity impact
LOW Availability impact
NONE Summary
http4s is an open source scala interface for HTTP. In affected versions http4s is vulnerable to response-splitting or request-splitting attacks when untrusted user input is used to create any of the following fields: Header names (`Header.name`å), Header values (`Header.value`), Status reason phrases (`Status.reason`), URI paths (`Uri.Path`), URI authority registered names (`URI.RegName`) (through 0.21). This issue has been resolved in versions 0.21.30, 0.22.5, 0.23.4, and 1.0.0-M27 perform the following. As a matter of practice http4s services and client applications should sanitize any user input in the aforementioned fields before returning a request or response to the backend. The carriage return, newline, and null characters are the most threatening.
Vulnerable Configurations
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Buffer Overflow via Environment Variables This attack pattern involves causing a buffer overflow through manipulation of environment variables. Once the attacker finds that they can modify an environment variable, they may try to overflow associated buffers. This attack leverages implicit trust often placed in environment variables.
- Server Side Include (SSI) Injection An attacker can use Server Side Include (SSI) Injection to send code to a web application that then gets executed by the web server. Doing so enables the attacker to achieve similar results to Cross Site Scripting, viz., arbitrary code execution and information disclosure, albeit on a more limited scale, since the SSI directives are nowhere near as powerful as a full-fledged scripting language. Nonetheless, the attacker can conveniently gain access to sensitive files, such as password files, and execute shell commands.
- Cross Site Scripting through Log Files An attacker may leverage a system weakness where logs are susceptible to log injection to insert scripts into the system's logs. If these logs are later viewed by an administrator through a thin administrative interface and the log data is not properly HTML encoded before being written to the page, the attackers' scripts stored in the log will be executed in the administrative interface with potentially serious consequences. This attack pattern is really a combination of two other attack patterns: log injection and stored cross site scripting.
- Command Line Execution through SQL Injection An attacker uses standard SQL injection methods to inject data into the command line for execution. This could be done directly through misuse of directives such as MSSQL_xp_cmdshell or indirectly through injection of data into the database that would be interpreted as shell commands. Sometime later, an unscrupulous backend application (or could be part of the functionality of the same application) fetches the injected data stored in the database and uses this data as command line arguments without performing proper validation. The malicious data escapes that data plane by spawning new commands to be executed on the host.
- Subverting Environment Variable Values The attacker directly or indirectly modifies environment variables used by or controlling the target software. The attacker's goal is to cause the target software to deviate from its expected operation in a manner that benefits the attacker.
References
- https://httpwg.org/http-core/draft-ietf-httpbis-semantics-latest.html#fields.values
- https://github.com/http4s/http4s/commit/d02007db1da4f8f3df2dbf11f1db9ac7afc3f9d8
- https://github.com/http4s/http4s/security/advisories/GHSA-5vcm-3xc3-w7x3
- https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/HTTP_Response_Splitting