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HTTP/1.1 must die: the desync endgame


Abstract Upstream HTTP/1.1 is inherently insecure and regularly exposes millions of websites to hostile takeover. Six years of attempted mitigations have hidden the issue, but failed to fix it. This p

This means that an attacker who finds the tiniest parser discrepancy in the server chain can cause a desync, apply a malicious prefix to other users' requests, and usually achieve complete site takeover: CL (Content-Length) TE (Transfer-Encoding) 0 (Implicit-zero) H2 (HTTP/2's built-in length) HTTP/1.1 may look secure at first glance because if you apply the original request smuggling methodology and toolkit, you'll have a hard time causing a desync. Note that HTTP/2 downgrading, where front-end servers speak HTTP/2 with clients but rewrite it as HTTP/1.1 for upstream communication, provides minimal security benefit and actually makes websites more exposed to desync attacks.

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