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.

If a message consumer expects data of type "list of pointers", and if the consumer performs certain specific actions on such data, then a message producer can cause the consumer to read out-of-bounds memory. This could trigger a process crash in the consumer, or in some cases could allow exfiltration of private in-memory data.

The C++ Cap'n Proto library is also affected by this bug. See the advisory on the main Cap'n Proto repo for a succinct description of the exact circumstances in which the problem can arise.

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);