CWE · MITRE source

CWE-113Improper Neutralization of CRLF Sequences in HTTP Headers ('HTTP Request/Response Splitting')

Abstraction: Variant · CVEs in our corpus: 109

The product receives data from an HTTP agent/component (e.g., web server, proxy, browser, etc.), but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes CR and LF characters before the data is included in outgoing HTTP headers.

HTTP agents or components may include a web server, load balancer, reverse proxy, web caching proxy, application firewall, web browser, etc. Regardless of the role, they are expected to maintain coherent, consistent HTTP communication state across all components. However, including unexpected data in an HTTP header allows an attacker to specify the entirety of the HTTP message that is rendered by the client HTTP agent (e.g., web browser) or back-end HTTP agent (e.g., web server), whether the message is part of a request or a response. When an HTTP request contains unexpected CR and LF characters, the server may respond with an output stream that is interpreted as "splitting" the stream into two different HTTP messages instead of one. CR is carriage return, also given by %0d or \r, and LF is line feed, also given by %0a or \n. In addition to CR and LF characters, other valid/RFC compliant special characters and unique character encodings can be utilized, such as HT (horizontal tab, also given by %09 or \t) and SP (space, also given as + sign or %20). These types of unvalidated and unexpected data in HTTP message headers allow an attacker to control the second "split" message to mount attacks such as server-side request forgery, cross-site scripting, and cache poisoning attacks. HTTP response splitting weaknesses may be present when:

Last updated: 20 August 2026 13:14 UTC