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.
A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.
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Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.
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