HIGH 8.7 Maven

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 bytes E2 84 AA decode to U+212A KELVIN SIGN, which
    String.equalsIgnoreCase Unicode-case-folds to k, so
    Transfer-Encoding: chun<U+212A>ed matches chunked once 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-Encoding case-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
    default proxy_request_buffering on)
  • Intermediary normalises the Transfer-Encoding value (lowercases the
    token) before forwarding
  • Disable backend keep-alive between the intermediary and Ember

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