CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-38162 — Sap Web Dispatcher security vulnerability
SAP Web Dispatcher versions - 7.49, 7.53, 7.77, 7.81, KRNL64NUC - 7.22, 7.22EXT, 7.49, KRNL64UC -7.22, 7.22EXT, 7.49, 7.53, KERNEL - 7.22, 7.49, 7.53, 7.77, 7.81, 7.83 processes allow an unauthenticated attacker to submit a malicious crafted request over a network to a front-end server which may, over several attempts, result in a back-end server confusing the boundaries of malicious and legitimate messages. This can result in the back-end server executing a malicious payload which can be used to read or modify any information on the server or consume server resources making it temporarily unavailable.
- Severity
- Critical
- CVSS
- 9.4 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-09-14
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-444
Affected products
- sap / web_dispatcher / 7.22ext
- sap / web_dispatcher / 7.49
- sap / web_dispatcher / 7.53
- sap / web_dispatcher / 7.77
- sap / web_dispatcher / 7.81
- sap / web_dispatcher / 7.83
Matched remediation archetype
HTTP request smuggling and message-boundary ambiguity
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
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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