HTTP Desync Attacks: Request Smuggling Reborn
https://portswigger.net/blog/http-desync-attacks-request-smuggling-reborn [portswigger.net]
2019-08-08 00:59
HTTP requests are traditionally viewed as isolated, standalone entities. In this paper, I’ll explore forgotten techniques for remote, unauthenticated attackers to smash through this isolation and splice their requests into others, through which I was able to play puppeteer with the web infrastructure of numerous commercial and military systems, rain exploits on their visitors, and harvest over $70k in bug bounties.
The protocol is extremely simple - HTTP requests are simply placed back to back, and the server parses headers to work out where each one ends and the next one starts. This is often confused with HTTP pipelining, which is a rarer subtype that’s not required for the attacks described in this paper. By itself, this is harmless. However, modern websites are composed of chains of systems, all talking over HTTP. This multi-tiered architecture takes HTTP requests from multiple different users and routes them over a single TCP/TLS connection:
source: grugq