When a remote client closes the connection before waitress has had the opportunity to call getpeername() waitress won't correctly clean up the connection leading to the main thread attempting to write to a socket that no longer exists, but not removing it from the list of sockets to attempt to process. This leads to a busy-loop calling the write function. A remote attacker could run waitress out of available sockets …
A remote client may send a request that is exactly recv_bytes (defaults to 8192) long, followed by a secondary request using HTTP pipelining. When request lookahead is disabled (default) we won't read any more requests, and when the first request fails due to a parsing error, we simply close the connection. However when request lookahead is enabled, it is possible to process and receive the first request, start sending the …
Waitress may terminate early due to a thread closing a socket while the main thread is about to call select(). This will lead to the main thread raising an exception that is not handled and then causing the entire application to be killed.
When using Waitress behind a proxy that does not properly validate the incoming HTTP request matches the RFC7230 standard, Waitress and the frontend proxy may disagree on where one request starts and where it ends. This would allow requests to be smuggled via the front-end proxy to waitress and later behavior. There are two classes of vulnerability that may lead to request smuggling that are addressed by this advisory: The …
When waitress receives a header that contains invalid characters it will cause the regular expression engine to catastrophically backtrack causing the process to use 100% CPU time and blocking any other interactions. This would allow an attacker to send a single request with an invalid header and take the service offline. Invalid header example: Bad-header: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\x10 Increasing the number of x's in the header will increase the amount of time …
Waitress allows request smuggling by sending the Content-Length header twice. Waitress would header fold a double Content-Length header and due to being unable to cast the now comma separated value to an integer would set the Content-Length to 0 internally. If two Content-Length headers are sent in a single request, Waitress treats the body of the request as a new request in HTTP pipelining.
The patches introduced to fix https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/security/advisories/GHSA-m5ff-3wj3-8ph4 were not complete and still would allow an attacker to smuggle requests/split a HTTP request with invalid data. This updates the existing CVE with ID: CVE-2019-16789
Improper Neutralization in waitress.
Waitress implemented a "MAY" part of the RFC7230 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7230#section-3.5) 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 …
Waitress would parse the Transfer-Encoding header and only look for a single string value, if that value was not chunked it would fall through and use the Content-Length header instead. According to the HTTP standard Transfer-Encoding should be a comma separated list, with the inner-most encoding first, followed by any further transfer codings, ending with chunked. Requests sent with: Transfer-Encoding: gzip, chunked Would incorrectly get ignored, and the request would …