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Description
Improper Neutralization of CRLF Sequences ('CRLF Injection') vulnerability in ninenines cowlib allows HTTP request splitting and cookie smuggling via unvalidated cookie name and value fields.
cow_cookie:cookie/1 in cowlib builds a client-side Cookie: request header from a list of name-value pairs without validating either field. An attacker who controls the cookie names or values passed to this function can inject ;, ,, CR, LF, or TAB characters into the serialized header. This enables two classes of attack: cookie smuggling within a single header (e.g. injecting ; admin=1 to introduce a phantom cookie that the receiving server treats as authentic) and HTTP request header splitting (injecting CRLF to append arbitrary headers or smuggle a complete second request against a shared upstream proxy). The decoder side (parse_cookie_name/1, parse_cookie_value/1) and setcookie/3 already validate and reject these characters; the encoder alone is missing the check.
This issue affects cowlib from 2.9.0.
Weaknesses & attack patterns
Weakness
CWE-93
·
Improper Neutralization of CRLF Sequences ('CRLF Injection')
in catalog →
MITRE ↗
Attack patterns
CAPEC-105
·
HTTP Request Splitting
MITRE ↗
Affected — Hex / cowlib Hex.pm ↗ Repository ↗
modules · source files · routines
Affected — GitHub / ninenines/cowlib Repository ↗
modules · source files · routines
Workarounds
Validate inputs into cow_cookie:cookie/1 to only include valid cookie name and value characters as defined in RFC 6265 Section 4.1.1 before passing them to the function.
Configurations
The application must pass attacker-controlled bytes as cookie names or values to cow_cookie:cookie/1. Applications that construct cookie lists exclusively from trusted, application-controlled values are not affected.
References
Credits
CVSS breakdown
CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:L/SA:N