Gunicorn fails to properly validate Transfer-Encoding headers, leading to HTTP Request Smuggling (HRS) vulnerabilities. By crafting requests with conflicting Transfer-Encoding headers, attackers can bypass security restrictions and access restricted endpoints. This issue is due to Gunicorn's handling of Transfer-Encoding headers, where it incorrectly processes requests with multiple, conflicting Transfer-Encoding headers, treating them as chunked regardless of the final encoding specified. This vulnerability allows for a range of attacks including cache poisoning, session manipulation, and data exposure.
The product acts as an intermediary HTTP agent (such as a proxy or firewall) in the data flow between two entities such as a client and server, but it does not interpret malformed HTTP requests or responses in ways that are consistent with how the messages will be processed by those entities that are at the ultimate destination.