A malicious HTTP sender can use chunk extensions to cause a receiver reading from a request or response body to read many more bytes from the network than are in the body. A malicious HTTP client can further exploit this to cause a server to automatically read a large amount of data (up to about 1GiB) when a handler fails to read the entire body of a request. Chunk extensions are a little-used HTTP feature which permit including additional metadata in a request or response body sent using the chunked encoding. The net/http chunked encoding reader discards this metadata. A sender can exploit this by inserting a large metadata segment with each byte transferred. The chunk reader now produces an error if the ratio of real body to encoded bytes grows too small.
With Rapid7 live dashboards, I have a clear view of all the assets on my network, which ones can be exploited, and what I need to do in order to reduce the risk in my environment in real-time. No other tool gives us that kind of value and insight.
– Scott Cheney, Manager of Information Security, Sierra View Medical Center