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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.8

CVE-2023-38697 json

protocol-http1 HTTP Request/Response Smuggling vulnerability

published 2023-08-03 3 y ago modified 2026-09-10 1 mo ago also GHSA-6jwc-qr2q-7xwj , EUVD-2023-2225

cvss
5.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.8%
EPSS 0.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 55%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • rubygems protocol-http1 0.15.1
  • socketry protocol-http1 0.15.1
  • ruby-protocol-http1 Debian 14 0.35.2-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2023-38697

  • rubygem-protocol-http1 CBL-Mariner 2.0 0.15.1-1

azure linux advisories AZL-27830

Azure Linux vulnerability data, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, from https://github.com/microsoft/AzureLinuxVulnerabilityData via OSV, under the MIT licence; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. MIT

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2023-38697 updated cvss 5.3

protocol-http1: rubygem Strict validation of content length and chunk length

  • Red Hat Logging Subsystem for Red Hat OpenShift openshift-logging/fluentd-rhel8
    affected: no fix available
  • Red Hat 3scale API Management Platform 2 3scale-amp2/backend-rhel8
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

0.75% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 55% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 5.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:N
NVD 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
GitHub 3.1 5.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
rubygems protocol-http1
<0.15.1
0.15.1

Affected products

  • socketry protocol-http1

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-444 Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.