Vulnerable versions of hyper allow GET requests to have bodies, even if there is no Transfer-Encoding or Content-Length header. As per the HTTP 1.1 specification, such requests do not have bodies, so the body will be interpreted as a separate HTTP request.

This allows an attacker who can control the body and method of an HTTP request made by hyper to inject a request with headers that would not otherwise be allowed, as demonstrated by sending a malformed HTTP request from a Substrate runtime. This allows bypassing CORS restrictions. In combination with other vulnerabilities, such as an exploitable web server listening on loopback, it may allow remote code execution.

The flaw was corrected in hyper version 0.12.34.

hyper's HTTP header parser accepted, according to RFC 7230, illegal contents inside Content-Length headers. Due to this, upstream HTTP proxies that ignore the header may still forward them along if it chooses to ignore the error.

To be vulnerable, hyper must be used as an HTTP/1 server and using an HTTP proxy upstream that ignores the header's contents but still forwards it. Due to all the factors that must line up, an attack exploiting this vulnerability is unlikely.

When decoding chunk sizes that are too large, hyper's code would encounter an integer overflow. Depending on the situation, this could lead to data loss from an incorrect total size, or in rarer cases, a request smuggling attack.

To be vulnerable, you must be using hyper for any HTTP/1 purpose, including as a client or server, and consumers must send requests or responses that specify a chunk size greater than 18 exabytes. For a possible request smuggling attack to be possible, any upstream proxies must accept a chunk size greater than 64 bits.