CWE-444 Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests

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 This weakness is usually the result of the usage of outdated or incompatible HTTP protocol versions in the HTTP agents.

• Integrity, Non-Repudiation, Access Control: Unexpected State, Hide Activities, Bypass Protection Mechanism — An attacker could create HTTP messages to exploit a number of weaknesses including 1) the message can trick the web server to associate a URL with another URL's webpage and caching the contents of the webpage (web cache poisoning attack), 2) the message can be structured to bypass the firewall protection mechanisms and gain unauthorized access to a web application, and 3) the message can invoke a script or a page that returns client credentials (similar to a Cross Site Scripting attack).

• [Implementation] Use a web server that employs a strict HTTP parsing procedure, such as Apache [REF-433]. • [Implementation] Use only SSL communication. • [Implementation] Terminate the client session after each request. • [System Configuration] Turn all pages to non-cacheable.

• Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)

• CVE-2022-24766: SSL/TLS-capable proxy allows HTTP smuggling when used in tandem with HTTP/1.0 services, due to inconsistent interpretation and input sanitization of HTTP messages within the body of another message • CVE-2021-37147: Chain: caching proxy server has improper input validation (CWE-20) of headers, allowing HTTP response smuggling (CWE-444) using an "LF line ending" • CVE-2020-8287: Node.js platform allows request smuggling via two Transfer-Encoding headers • CVE-2006-6276: Web servers allow request smuggling via inconsistent HTTP headers. • CVE-2005-2088: HTTP server allows request smuggling with both a "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" header and a Content-Length header • CVE-2005-2089: HTTP server allows request smuggling with both a "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" header and a Content-Length header