Sign-tolerant HTTP/1 chunk-size parser in Mint enables response smuggling against strict intermediaries on pooled connections

Summary

Inconsistent interpretation of HTTP requests (HTTP response smuggling) vulnerability in elixir-mint mint allows a malicious HTTP/1 server to desynchronize a strict intermediary and the Mint client on the same pooled connection, enabling response-queue poisoning against subsequent requests that share the connection.

The Mint.HTTP1.decode_body/5 function in lib/mint/http1.ex parses the chunk-size line of a Transfer-Encoding: chunked response with Integer.parse(data, 16). RFC 7230 defines chunk-size = 1*HEXDIG and forbids any sign prefix, but Integer.parse/2 accepts an optional leading + or -. A chunk-size line of +5 is accepted as a five-byte chunk; lines of +0 and -0 are accepted as the terminating zero-length chunk and end the message body early.

An RFC-strict intermediary in the response path rejects these forms, so the intermediary and the Mint client disagree on where one response ends and the next begins. On a pooled keep-alive connection, an attacker-influenced origin can inject bytes that the client attributes to the next legitimate response on the same connection, poisoning the response queue and corrupting the responses returned to unrelated in-flight requests.

This issue affects mint: from 0.1.0 before 1.9.3.

Configurations

Exploitation requires a deployment topology in which an RFC-strict HTTP/1 intermediary (proxy, load balancer, or WAF) sits between the Mint client and the attacker-influenced origin, and HTTP/1 connections between the client and the intermediary are reused across requests (keep-alive with connection pooling). Mint clients that talk directly to an origin without an intermediary, or that do not reuse connections, are not exploitable for response-queue poisoning even if the vulnerable parsing behavior is present.