Repair HTTP Request Framing Bugs

The problem

Inconsistent HTTP request framing causes dangerous parser mismatches between proxies and backends. These defects lead to request smuggling, broken body boundaries, and state ownership errors that are difficult to reproduce or debug.

What it does

• Identifies and patches inconsistent handling of Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding headers.
• Normalizes hop-by-hop headers and proxy-to-backend handoff logic to ensure parser agreement.
• Relocates validation logic to happen before irreversible state mutations or backend dispatch.
• Generates deterministic local byte fixtures and loopback tests to verify framing fixes without live traffic.
• Ensures transaction cleanup and callbacks are correctly bound to the specific request lifecycle.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Manual prompts often overlook subtle edge cases like trailer handling or parser terminal states, leading to incomplete fixes. This skill enforces a canonical contract for state transitions and prevents common pitfalls like hiding framing defects behind broad retries or sleeps.

Use cases

• Fixing request smuggling vulnerabilities caused by ambiguous header parsing.
• Standardizing chunked transfer encoding across multiple internal microservices.
• Implementing strict body boundary validation in a custom HTTP proxy or middleware.
• Creating regression tests for specific malformed HTTP request sequences.

Known limitations

Cannot contact production services or access live customer data. Requires repository access to local files and the ability to run bash-based tests.