PyPi: Waitress

CVE-2019-16785

Safety vulnerability ID: 37822

This vulnerability was reviewed by experts

The information on this page was manually curated by our Cybersecurity Intelligence Team.

Created at Dec 20, 2019 Updated at Mar 29, 2024
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Advisory

Waitress 1.4.0 includes a fix for CVE-2019-16785: Waitress through version 1.3.1 implemented a "MAY" part of the RFC7230 which states: "Although the line terminator for the start-line and header fields is the sequence CRLF, a recipient MAY recognize a single LF as a line terminator and ignore any preceding CR." Unfortunately if a front-end server does not parse header fields with an LF the same way as it does those with a CRLF it can lead to the front-end and the back-end server parsing the same HTTP message in two different ways. This can lead to a potential for HTTP request smuggling/splitting whereby Waitress may see two requests while the front-end server only sees a single HTTP message.
https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/security/advisories/GHSA-pg36-wpm5-g57p

Affected package

waitress

Latest version: 3.0.0

Waitress WSGI server

Affected versions

Fixed versions

Vulnerability changelog

------------------

Security Fixes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- In Waitress version 1.4.2 a new regular expression was added to validate the
headers that Waitress receives to make sure that it matches RFC7230.
Unfortunately the regular expression was written in a way that with invalid
input it leads to catastrophic backtracking which allows for a Denial of
Service and CPU usage going to a 100%.

This was reported by Fil Zembowicz to the Pylons Project. Please see
https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/security/advisories/GHSA-73m2-3pwg-5fgc
for more information.

Resources

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Severity Details

CVSS Base Score

HIGH 7.5

CVSS v3 Details

HIGH 7.5
Attack Vector (AV)
NETWORK
Attack Complexity (AC)
LOW
Privileges Required (PR)
NONE
User Interaction (UI)
NONE
Scope (S)
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact (C)
NONE
Integrity Impact (I)
HIGH
Availability Availability (A)
NONE

CVSS v2 Details

MEDIUM 5.0
Access Vector (AV)
NETWORK
Access Complexity (AC)
LOW
Authentication (Au)
NONE
Confidentiality Impact (C)
NONE
Integrity Impact (I)
PARTIAL
Availability Impact (A)
NONE