CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-26281 — async-h1 is an asynchronous HTTP/1.1 parser for Rust (crates.io)

High CVSS 7.5

async-h1 is an asynchronous HTTP/1.1 parser for Rust (crates.io). There is a request smuggling vulnerability in async-h1 before version 2.3.0. This vulnerability affects any webserver that uses async-h1 behind a reverse proxy, including all such Tide applications. If the server does not read the body of a request which is longer than some buffer length, async-h1 will attempt to read a subsequent request from the body content starting at that offset into the body. One way to exploit this vulnerability would be for an adversary to craft a request such that the body contains a request that would not be noticed by a reverse proxy, allowing it to forge forwarded/x-forwarded headers. If an application trusted the authenticity of these headers, it could be misled by the smuggled request. Another potential concern with this vulnerability is that if a reverse proxy is sending multiple http clients' requests along the same keep-alive connection, it would be possible for the smuggled request to specify a long content and capture another user's request in its body. This content could be captured in a post request to an endpoint that allows the content to be subsequently retrieved by the adver…

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-12-21
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-444

Affected products

  • rust-lang / async-h1

Matched remediation archetype

HTTP request smuggling and message-boundary ambiguity

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Check exposure

  • Inventory every proxy, CDN, gateway, load balancer, service mesh, and application server hop on affected request paths.
  • Compare documented parsing and normalization behavior for message length, transfer coding, duplicate headers, and protocol translation.
  • Identify connection reuse and which downstream services trust headers added by intermediaries.

Remediate safely

  • Update affected intermediaries and origin servers and align them on a single standards-compliant request framing policy.
  • Reject ambiguous length, transfer-coding, duplicate, malformed, and unsupported framing before forwarding.
  • Normalize or remove hop-by-hop and identity headers at one controlled boundary and add multi-hop regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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