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LOW

Inconsistent interpretation of `Content-Length` vs. `Transfer-Encoding` in aiohttp

Published Nov 14, 2023

Description

aiohttp is an asynchronous HTTP client/server framework for asyncio and Python. Affected versions of aiohttp have a security vulnerability regarding the inconsistent interpretation of the http protocol. HTTP/1.1 is a persistent protocol, if both Content-Length(CL) and Transfer-Encoding(TE) header values are present it can lead to incorrect interpretation of two entities that parse the HTTP and we can poison other sockets with this incorrect interpretation. A possible Proof-of-Concept (POC) would be a configuration with a reverse proxy(frontend) that accepts both CL and TE headers and aiohttp as backend. As aiohttp parses anything with chunked, we can pass a chunked123 as TE, the frontend entity will ignore this header and will parse Content-Length. The impact of this vulnerability is that it is possible to bypass any proxy rule, poisoning sockets to other users like passing Authentication Headers, also if it is present an Open Redirect an attacker could combine it to redirect random users to another website and log the request. This vulnerability has been addressed in release 3.8.0 of aiohttp. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Affected products

Remediation

Red Hat statement

In order for actual exploitation of this flaw an open redirect flaw would have to be present to chain this, that is why Redhat has marked this vulnerability's attack complexity as high and since open redirect would need user interaction for exploitation CVSS for it has been marked as such.

Weaknesses (1)

References (11)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner GitHub_M
Published Nov 14, 2023
Updated Nov 3, 2025
Reserved Nov 7, 2023
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated Aug 29, 2024
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Low
Public date Nov 14, 2023
ENISA EUVD
Assigner GitHub_M
Published Nov 14, 2023
Updated Nov 3, 2025
Exploited since n/a
EUVD-2023-0005 GHSA-XX9P-XXVH-7G8J