Java : HTTP header manipulation

The application includes data from an untrusted source into the HTTP response header. Cache poisoning attacks, XSS, cookie manipulation, page hijacking, open redirect attacks and others are possible.

One of the most common attacks with the use of this vulnerability is HTTP response splitting . In this case, the attacker includes special CR (carriage return, also denoted as %0d and \r) and LF (new line, also %0a and \n) characters into the response header. This allows the attacker to not only manage the content of a response after these characters, but also create his/her own answers.

Most modern servers include protection against such attacks. For example, Apache Tomcat will generate exception of the IllegalArgumentException type when attempting to inject banned symbols into the header.