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Comment by knallfrosch | Hacker News Reader

To me it sounds like the server handled the request just fine and reused the header (which was wrong.) The client then had the problem of a wrong response.

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If you say to read 1000 bytes from memory and then pass a 900 bytes long array, that's a security bug that can cause crash, corrupt data, and leaking stuff that shouldn't have leaked.

The size of the buffer and how many bytes are written have nothing intrinsically linked to what the header says. It's a bug sure but does not mean there's any security issue on the server.

It will likely generate corrupt files on the client as well.

Not very. The system might allocate that length ahead of time (I've seen that option in torrent clients and iirc ftp systems) but, latest by the time a FIN comes in, it'll know the file is finished and can truncate it. If finished-early downloads are not implemented despite it doing preallocation, that's still not a security bug

if a FIN comes, the client will mark the file as partially downloaded.

but it might not come, since decades http sends more than one file per connection, so it might just get the beginning of the next reply, write that and the next reply will be corrupt as well.

It's a bug for sure, but I think whether it's a security issue could depend on the language. If the callee is able to determine the length of the array, it can just return an error instead of a potential buffer overrun.

In this case, the 1000 bytes aren't being read from memory, they're being read from a socket. If you try to over-read from a socket the worst you'll get is a blocking call or an error (depending what mode you're in).

maybe response based trickery then? :D What happens to the response after that one, are the first 100 bytes cut of, or what?

I'm pretty sure something like this can cause some form of HTTP desync in a loadbalancer/proxy setup.

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