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.

On Windows, configuring a named pipe server with pipe_mode will force ServerOptions::reject_remote_clients as false.

This drops any intended explicit configuration for the reject_remote_clients that may have been set as true previously.

The default setting of reject_remote_clients is normally true meaning the default is also overridden as false.

Workarounds

Ensure that pipe_mode is set first after initializing a ServerOptions. For example:

let mut opts = ServerOptions::new();
opts.pipe_mode(PipeMode::Message);
opts.reject_remote_clients(true);

In the unique reclaim path of BytesMut::reserve, the condition

if v_capacity >= new_cap + offset

uses an unchecked addition. When new_cap + offset overflows usize in release builds, this condition may incorrectly pass, causing self.cap to be set to a value that exceeds the actual allocated capacity. Subsequent APIs such as spare_capacity_mut() then trust this corrupted cap value and may create out-of-bounds slices, leading to UB.

This behavior is observable in release builds (integer overflow wraps), whereas debug builds panic due to overflow checks.

PoC

use bytes::*;

fn main() {
    let mut a = BytesMut::from(&b"hello world"[..]);
    let mut b = a.split_off(5);

    // Ensure b becomes the unique owner of the backing storage
    drop(a);

    // Trigger overflow in new_cap + offset inside reserve
    b.reserve(usize::MAX - 6);

    // This call relies on the corrupted cap and may cause UB & HBO
    b.put_u8(b'h');
}

Workarounds

Users of BytesMut::reserve are only affected if integer overflow checks are configured to wrap. When integer overflow is configured to panic, this issue does not apply.