CVE-2019-16869
Description
A flaw was found in Netty, where whitespace before the colon in HTTP headers is mishandled. This flaw allows an attacker to cause HTTP request smuggling.
Statement
OpenShift Container Platform ships a vulnerable netty library as part of the logging-elasticsearch5 container. ElasticSearch's security team has stated that this vulnerability does not poses a substantial practical threat to ElasticSearch 6 [1]. We agree that this issue would be difficult to exploit these vulnerabilities on OpenShift Container Platform, so we're reducing the impact of this issue to moderate and may fix it in the future release.
Red Hat Satellite ships vulnerable netty version embedded in Candlepin, however, is not directly vulnerable since HTTP requests are handled by Tomcat and not netty.
Mitigation
* Use HTTP/2 instead (clear boundaries between requests)
* Disable reuse of backend connections eg.
http-reuse neverin HAProxy or whatever equivalent LB settings
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 7.5 | 7.5 | N/A |
| Attack Vector | Network | Network | N/A |
| Attack Complexity | Low | Low | N/A |
| Privileges Required | None | None | N/A |
| User Interaction | None | None | N/A |
| Scope | Unchanged | Unchanged | N/A |
| Confidentiality | None | None | N/A |
| Integrity Impact | High | High | N/A |
| Availability Impact | None | None | N/A |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
NVD: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Integrity,Non-Repudiation,Access Control
Technical Impact: Unexpected State; Hide Activities; Bypass Protection Mechanism
An attacker could create HTTP messages to exploit a number of weaknesses including 1) the message can trick the web server to associate a URL with another URL's webpage and caching the contents of the webpage (web cache poisoning attack), 2) the message can be structured to bypass the firewall protection mechanisms and gain unauthorized access to a web application, and 3) the message can invoke a script or a page that returns client credentials (similar to a Cross Site Scripting attack).
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