GHSA-x2w3-23jr-hrpf
ewe Has Improper Neutralization of CRLF Sequences in HTTP Headers (HTTP Request/Response Splitting)
Packages
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
### Summary
The `encode_headers` function in `src/ewe/internal/encoder.gleam` directly interpolates response header keys and values into raw HTTP bytes without validating or stripping CRLF (`\r\n`) sequences. An application that passes user-controlled data into response headers (e.g., setting a `Location` redirect header from a request parameter) allows an attacker to inject arbitrary HTTP response content, leading to response splitting, cache poisoning, and possible cross-site scripting.
Notably, ewe *does* validate CRLF in **incoming** request headers via `validate_field_value()` in the HTTP/1.1 parser — but provides no equivalent protection for **outgoing** response headers in the encoder.
### Details
**File:** `src/ewe/internal/encoder.gleam`
**Vulnerable code:**
```gleam
fn encode_headers(headers: List(#(String, String))) -> BitArray {
let headers =
list.fold(headers, <<>>, fn(acc, headers) {
let #(key, value) = headers
<<acc:bits, key:utf8, ": ", value:utf8, "\r\n">>
})
<<headers:bits, "\r\n">>
}
```
Both `key` and `value` are embedded directly into the `BitArray` output. If either contains `\r\n`, the resulting bytes become a structurally valid but attacker-controlled HTTP response, terminating the current header early and injecting new headers or a second HTTP response.
**Contrast with request parsing** (`src/ewe/internal/http1.gleam`): incoming header values are protected:
```gleam
use value <- try(
validate_field_value(value) |> replace_error(InvalidHeaders)
)
```
No analogous validation exists for outgoing header values in the encoder. The solution is to strip or reject `\r` (0x0D) and `\n` (0x0A) from all header key and value strings in `encode_headers` before encoding, mirroring the validation already applied to incoming request headers via `validate_field_value()`
### PoC
An ewe application echoes a user-supplied redirect URL into a `Location` header:
```gleam
fn handle_request(req: Request) -> Response {
let redirect_url =
request.get_query(req)
|> result.try(list.key_find(_, "next"))
|> result.unwrap("/home")
response.new(302)
|> response.set_header("location", redirect_url)
|> response.set_body(ewe.Empty)
}
```
Attacker request:
```bash
printf 'GET /?next=https://example.com%%0d%%0aX-Injected:%%20true HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: localhost\r\n\r\n' | nc -w 2 localhost 8080
```
Resulting response:
```
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
location: https://example.com
X-Injected: true
content-length: 0
date: Tue, 24 Mar 2026 07:53:00 GMT
connection: keep-alive
```
The `X-Injected: true` header appears as a separate response header, confirming that CRLF sequences in user input are not sanitized by the encoder.
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.