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.

Affected versions of the gunicorn package are vulnerable to HTTP Request/Response Smuggling due to improper validation of the Transfer-Encoding header that enables a TE.CL desynchronisation condition. Gunicorn’s HTTP parser does not consistently enforce RFC semantics when parsing conflicting or unsupported request framing—such as messages containing both Transfer-Encoding and Content-Length—so the backend may fall back to Content-Length while an intermediary treats the message as chunked.