CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-39214 — mitmproxy is an interactive, SSL/TLS-capable intercepting proxy

Critical CVSS 9.8

mitmproxy is an interactive, SSL/TLS-capable intercepting proxy. In mitmproxy 7.0.2 and below, a malicious client or server is able to perform HTTP request smuggling attacks through mitmproxy. This means that a malicious client/server could smuggle a request/response through mitmproxy as part of another request/response's HTTP message body. While a smuggled request is still captured as part of another request's body, it does not appear in the request list and does not go through the usual mitmproxy event hooks, where users may have implemented custom access control checks or input sanitization. Unless one uses mitmproxy to protect an HTTP/1 service, no action is required. The vulnerability has been fixed in mitmproxy 7.0.3 and above.

Severity
Critical
CVSS
9.8 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-444

Affected products

  • mitmproxy / mitmproxy

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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