Http4s Ember Transfer-Encoding value parsing (TE.CL / TE.0 request smuggling)
GHSA-9998-894r-fwvr · CVE-2026-69205
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Description
Summary
Ember's HTTP/1.1 header parser matches the Transfer-Encoding header value
with a case-sensitive substring test (hValue.contains("chunked")). RFC
9112 §7 requires transfer-coding names to be compared case-insensitively. A
request carrying Transfer-Encoding: Chunked (capital C) is therefore not
recognised as chunked, and Ember falls back to framing by Content-Length
(or zero if absent) while a compliant intermediary frames the same bytes by
chunked encoding. The two parsers then disagree on where the request body
ends, enabling HTTP request smuggling (TE.CL / TE.0).
The same line of code admits two further variants:
- The substring test misfires on
Transfer-Encoding: notchunked(an inverse
desync — Ember treats it as chunked while a compliant intermediary
rejects the unknown coding). - Header field bytes are decoded with the platform-default charset. Under
UTF-8 the wire bytesE2 84 AAdecode to U+212A KELVIN SIGN, whichString.equalsIgnoreCaseUnicode-case-folds tok, soTransfer-Encoding: chun<U+212A>edmatcheschunkedonce the comparison
is made case-insensitive without also pinning the decode to ISO-8859-1.
Impact
Server
Request smuggling when ember-server is an origin behind an intermediary that
honours Transfer-Encoding case-insensitively per RFC, forwards the header
value verbatim, and reuses keep-alive connections to the backend:
- Front-end security bypass: the smuggled request reaches paths the
intermediary's ACL/auth layer would have blocked, with attacker-chosen
method and headers. - Cross-user request hijack: a partial smuggled prefix left in Ember's
connection buffer is concatenated with the next victim's request on the
same pooled backend connection, exposing its headers (e.g.Cookie,Authorization) to the attacker. - Cache poisoning: the smuggled response is associated with the next request
key in a caching proxy.
Client
ember-client shares the same HeaderP.parse on the response path, enabling
response smuggling when http4s is used as a gateway. This is less severe: it
requires a malicious or compromised upstream rather than an anonymous remote
client.
Preconditions
- Unauthenticated remote attacker (server)
- ember-server as origin behind a keep-alive intermediary
- Intermediary treats
Transfer-Encodingcase-insensitively (per RFC) and
forwards the header value without lowercasing it - Malicious or compromised upstream (client)
Workarounds
- Intermediary fully buffers and re-encodes request bodies (e.g. nginx with
defaultproxy_request_buffering on) - Intermediary normalises the
Transfer-Encodingvalue (lowercases the
token) before forwarding - Disable backend keep-alive between the intermediary and Ember
References
- WEB https://github.com/http4s/http4s/security/advisories/GHSA-9998-894r-fwvr
- WEB https://github.com/http4s/http4s/commit/5e88b2e7b4e6ea2f0c61040a4bc9de0d73e51217
- PACKAGE https://github.com/http4s/http4s
- WEB https://github.com/http4s/http4s/releases/tag/v0.23.35
- WEB https://github.com/http4s/http4s/releases/tag/v1.0.0-M47
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