Skip to content

connectd websocket: HTTP handshake headers matched case-sensitively, rejecting RFC-compliant clients #9307

Description

@coreyphillips

Issue

connectd/websocketd.c matches HTTP header names byte-exactly (get_http_hdr uses memstarts) and matches the Upgrade/Connection values with case-sensitive strstr. RFC 9110 section 5.1 makes field names case-insensitive, and the RFC 6455 excerpt quoted in the file itself says the Upgrade and Connection values are "treated as an ASCII case-insensitive value".

Practical impact: Node.js's built-in WebSocket (undici) sends lowercased request headers, so it can never connect to a bind-addr=ws: listener. Any other client that normalizes header casing fails the same way.

Steps to reproduce

Against v26.06.1 with bind-addr=ws:0.0.0.0:19847:

printf 'GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nhost: x\r\nupgrade: websocket\r\nconnection: Upgrade\r\nsec-websocket-key: dGhlIHNhbXBsZSBub25jZQ==\r\nsec-websocket-version: 13\r\n\r\n' | nc <host> 19847

returns:

HTTP/1.1 400 I only speak websocket
Upgrade: websocket missing

The identical request with RFC-cased header names (Upgrade, Connection, Sec-WebSocket-Key, Sec-WebSocket-Version) succeeds with 101 Switching Protocols. new WebSocket('ws://<host>:19847') from Node 22 fails the same way, while browsers happen to send RFC casing and work.

PR with a fix to follow shortly.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions