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MEDIUM5.3

GHSA-x2w3-23jr-hrpf

ewe Has Improper Neutralization of CRLF Sequences in HTTP Headers (HTTP Request/Response Splitting)

Quick fix

GHSA-x2w3-23jr-hrpf — ewe: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

mix deps.update ewe

Details

### Summary

The `encode_headers` function in `src/ewe/internal/encoder.gleam` directly interpolates response header keys and values into raw HTTP bytes without validating or stripping CRLF (`\r\n`) sequences. An application that passes user-controlled data into response headers (e.g., setting a `Location` redirect header from a request parameter) allows an attacker to inject arbitrary HTTP response content, leading to response splitting, cache poisoning, and possible cross-site scripting.

Notably, ewe *does* validate CRLF in **incoming** request headers via `validate_field_value()` in the HTTP/1.1 parser — but provides no equivalent protection for **outgoing** response headers in the encoder.

### Details

**File:** `src/ewe/internal/encoder.gleam`

**Vulnerable code:** ```gleam fn encode_headers(headers: List(#(String, String))) -> BitArray { let headers = list.fold(headers, <<>>, fn(acc, headers) { let #(key, value) = headers <<acc:bits, key:utf8, ": ", value:utf8, "\r\n">> })

<<headers:bits, "\r\n">> } ```

Both `key` and `value` are embedded directly into the `BitArray` output. If either contains `\r\n`, the resulting bytes become a structurally valid but attacker-controlled HTTP response, terminating the current header early and injecting new headers or a second HTTP response.

**Contrast with request parsing** (`src/ewe/internal/http1.gleam`): incoming header values are protected: ```gleam use value <- try( validate_field_value(value) |> replace_error(InvalidHeaders) ) ```

No analogous validation exists for outgoing header values in the encoder. The solution is to strip or reject `\r` (0x0D) and `\n` (0x0A) from all header key and value strings in `encode_headers` before encoding, mirroring the validation already applied to incoming request headers via `validate_field_value()`

### PoC

An ewe application echoes a user-supplied redirect URL into a `Location` header:

```gleam fn handle_request(req: Request) -> Response { let redirect_url = request.get_query(req) |> result.try(list.key_find(_, "next")) |> result.unwrap("/home")

response.new(302) |> response.set_header("location", redirect_url) |> response.set_body(ewe.Empty) } ```

Attacker request: ```bash printf 'GET /?next=https://example.com%%0d%%0aX-Injected:%%20true HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: localhost\r\n\r\n' | nc -w 2 localhost 8080 ```

Resulting response: ``` HTTP/1.1 302 Found location: https://example.com X-Injected: true content-length: 0 date: Tue, 24 Mar 2026 07:53:00 GMT connection: keep-alive

```

The `X-Injected: true` header appears as a separate response header, confirming that CRLF sequences in user input are not sanitized by the encoder.

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

Hex/ewe
Introduced in: 0Fixed in: 3.0.6
Fixmix deps.update ewe

References