Affected versions of the urllib3 package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to redirect handling that drains connections by decompressing redirect response bodies without enforcing streaming read limits. The issue occurs when using urllib3’s streaming mode (for example, preload_content=False) while allowing redirects, because urllib3.response.HTTPResponse.drain_conn() would call HTTPResponse.read() in a way that decoded/decompressed the entire redirect response body even before any streaming reads were performed, effectively bypassing decompression-bomb safeguards.

Affected versions of the urllib3 package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to improper handling of highly compressed HTTP response bodies during streaming decompression. The urllib3.HTTPResponse methods stream(), read(), read1(), read_chunked(), and readinto() may fully decompress a minimal but highly compressed payload based on the Content-Encoding header into an internal buffer instead of limiting the decompressed output to the requested chunk size, causing excessive CPU usage and massive memory allocation on the client side.

Affected versions of the urllib3 package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to allowing an unbounded number of content-encoding decompression steps for HTTP responses. The HTTPResponse content decoding pipeline in urllib3 follows the Content-Encoding header and applies each advertised compression algorithm in sequence without enforcing a maximum chain length or effective output size, so a malicious peer can send a response with a very long encoding chain that triggers excessive CPU use and massive memory allocation during decompression.

Urllib3's ProxyManager ensures that the Proxy-Authorization header is correctly directed only to configured proxies. However, when HTTP requests bypass urllib3's proxy support, there's a risk of inadvertently setting the Proxy-Authorization header, which remains ineffective without a forwarding or tunneling proxy. Urllib3 does not recognize this header as carrying authentication data, failing to remove it during cross-origin redirects. While this scenario is uncommon and poses low risk to most users, urllib3 now proactively removes the Proxy-Authorization header during cross-origin redirects as a precautionary measure. Users are advised to utilize urllib3's proxy support or disable automatic redirects to handle the Proxy-Authorization header securely. Despite these precautions, urllib3 defaults to stripping the header to safeguard users who may inadvertently misconfigure requests.

Urllib3 is a user-friendly HTTP client library for Python. Starting in version 2.2.0 and before 2.5.0, urllib3 does not control redirects in browsers and Node.js. urllib3 supports being used in a Pyodide runtime, utilizing the JavaScript Fetch API or falling back on XMLHttpRequest. This means Python libraries can be used to make HTTP requests from a browser or Node.js. Additionally, urllib3 provides a mechanism to control redirects, but the retries and redirect parameters are ignored with Pyodide; the runtime itself determines redirect behaviour. This issue has been patched in version 2.5.0.

urllib3 is a user-friendly HTTP client library for Python. Prior to 2.5.0, it is possible to disable redirects for all requests by instantiating a PoolManager and specifying retries in a way that disable redirects. By default, requests and botocore users are not affected. An application attempting to mitigate SSRF or open redirect vulnerabilities by disabling redirects at the PoolManager level will remain vulnerable. This issue has been patched in version 2.5.0.