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Abusing HTTP Hop-By-Hop Request Headers

This document discusses techniques for abusing HTTP hop-by-hop headers, which are meant to be processed by intermediaries and not forwarded to the end server. It explains how setting certain headers like Connection to treat other headers as hop-by-hop can be used to bypass authentication, poison caches, fingerprint services, and mask client IP addresses.

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40 views

Abusing HTTP Hop-By-Hop Request Headers

This document discusses techniques for abusing HTTP hop-by-hop headers, which are meant to be processed by intermediaries and not forwarded to the end server. It explains how setting certain headers like Connection to treat other headers as hop-by-hop can be used to bypass authentication, poison caches, fingerprint services, and mask client IP addresses.

Uploaded by

setyahangga3
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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This section covers techniques which can be used to influence web systems and applications in unexpected ways, by abusing

HTTP/1.1 hop-by-hop
headers. Systems affected by these techniques are likely to have multiple caches/proxies that process requests before reaching a server application.

Abusing HTTP Hop-by-hop request headers


The specification RFC 2612 defines two categories of HTTP headers:

End-to-end headers that are transmitted to the ultimate recipient of a request or response. End-to-end headers in responses must be stored as
part of a cache entry and must be transmitted in any response formed from a cache entry.
Hop-by-hop headers that are meaningful only for a single transport-level connection, and are not stored by caches or forwarded by proxies.

In other words, a hop-by-hop header designed for processing and using by a proxy server that is currently processing a request, unlike an end-to-
end header that is designed to be present in a request until the end of the request.

The specification RFC 2612 defines the following headers as hop-by-hop by default:

Keep-Alive ,

Transfer-Encoding ,

TE ,

Connection ,

Trailer ,

Upgrade ,

Proxy-Authorization ,

Proxy-Authenticate .

All other headers defined by HTTP/1.1 are end-to-end headers.

If hop-by-hop headers are found in the request, a compatible proxy server should process or perform actions regardless of what these headers
indicate, and not forward them to the next hop.
A request may also define a custom set of headers to be treated as hop-by-hop by adding them to the Connection header, like this:

Connection: close, X-Foo, X-Bar

A client asks a proxy server to treat X-Foo and X-Bar as hop-by-hop, which means that a client wants a proxy to remove them from a request
before sending it.

Abusing HTTP hop-by-hop request headers


The Connection header itself is the default hop-by-hop header. This implies that a compatible proxy server should not forward a list of custom hop-
by-hop headers to the next server in the chain in its Connection header when it forwards the request. However, in practice this does not always
occur, some systems either forward the entire Connection header or copy a hop-by-hop list and add it to their own Connection header. For
example, most likely HAProxy pass the Connection header untouched, the same behavior with Nginx in reverse proxy mode.

The following image shows how abusing hop-by-hop headers may cause problems if a backend expects a X-Important-Header and considers its
presence in the logical decision.

A quick and easy way to verify that systems are vulnerable to some sort of abuse hop-by-hop request header is to use a Cookie header for an
endpoint which requires authentication (assuming the target system uses cookie authentication). For example, let's assume that the
/api/users/profile endpoint returns 200 OK with information about user. In this case, the following request may return something other than the
expected response if a system is vulnerable:

GET /api/users/profile HTTP/1.1


Host: vulnerable-website.com
Cookie: sessionid=...
Connection: close, Cookie
To search for more interesting effects, you can use Burp Suite Intruder or a custom script with a list of known headers, like this one.

Bypass authentication or access control decisions


If an application relies on the presence/absence of any headers when making an authentication/authorization decision, abusing hop-by-hop headers
can be used to bypass such implementations.

{% embed url="https://www.horizon3.ai/f5-icontrol-rest-endpoint-authentication-bypass-technical-deep-dive/" %}

Cache poisoning DoS


The impact in this case is very similar to achieved with the usual Cache Poisoning DoS. However, in this case the method is slightly different - instead
of directly using or modifying request headers which create unwanted application state and poison a web cache, hop-by-hop headers are used to
create this unwanted state and remove headers on which an application relies in order to function normally.

To exploit Cache Poisoning DoS, it requires:

1. A frontend cache forwards a custom set of hop-by-hop headers, instead of process them.
2. Any intermediate proxies in the chain process the custom set and remove headers.
3. An application considers the presence of these headers and, if they are absent, return an unwanted response, for example, 400 Bad Request or
501 Not Implemented .

As a result, web cache before an application will cache this unwanted response and return to other users.

Fingerprinting services

When looking for hop-by-hop headers, look for differences in the responses that a server sends. Removing technology-specific or stack-specific
HTTP headers can cause various side effects that allows collecting more information about an application. The more specific headers, the more
accurate an application's fingerprint.
Masking the source IP address
When a frontend proxy server accepts a user's request, it can add a user's IP address to the X-Forwarded-For header, so that a backend knows a
user's IP address. However, if you tell a proxy that X-Forwarded-For header is hop-by-hop, it will remove the header from the request. So a backend
will either never receive a user's IP address, or receive an IP address of an element in elsewhere in the chain.

{% hint style="info" %} Remeber that X-Forwarded-For header is not the only header for transmitting a user's IP address. Forwarded , X-Real-IP
and etc. can be used as well. {% endhint %}

References
Abusing HTTP hop-by-hop request headers
Python script to find hop-by-hop header abuse potential against the provided URL
Writeup: Worldwide Server-side Cache Poisoning on All Akamai Edge Nodes ($50K+ Bounty Earned)

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