CWE-444

Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests ('HTTP Request/Response Smuggling')
AI Translation Available

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.

Status
incomplete
Abstraction
base
Web Based

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This weakness is usually the result of the usage of outdated or incompatible HTTP protocol versions in the HTTP agents.

Common Consequences

integrity non-repudiation access control
Impacts
unexpected state hide activities bypass protection mechanism

Potential Mitigations

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