CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-38697 — protocol-http1 provides a low-level implementation of the HTTP/1 protocol

Medium CVSS 5.8

protocol-http1 provides a low-level implementation of the HTTP/1 protocol. RFC 9112 Section 7.1 defined the format of chunk size, chunk data and chunk extension. The value of Content-Length header should be a string of 0-9 digits, the chunk size should be a string of hex digits and should split from chunk data using CRLF, and the chunk extension shouldn't contain any invisible character. However, Falcon has following behaviors while disobey the corresponding RFCs: accepting Content-Length header values that have `+` prefix, accepting Content-Length header values that written in hexadecimal with `0x` prefix, accepting `0x` and `+` prefixed chunk size, and accepting LF in chunk extension. This behavior can lead to desync when forwarding through multiple HTTP parsers, potentially results in HTTP request smuggling and firewall bypassing. This issue is fixed in `protocol-http1` v0.15.1. There are no known workarounds.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.8 (3.1)
Published
2023-08-04
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-444

Affected products

  • socketry / protocol-http1

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.