CVE-2019-16789 HIGH

CVE-2019-16789: HTTP Request Smuggling in Waitress: Invalid whitespace characters in headers

Vendor Pylons
Product Waitress
Weakness CWE-444
Published December 26, 2019
Last update August 5, 2024

CVSS base score

7.1/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity High
Privileges required Low
User interaction None
Confidentiality Low
Integrity High

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:N

What the vulnerability does

01Description

In Waitress through version 1.4.0, if a proxy server is used in front of waitress, an invalid request may be sent by an attacker that bypasses the front-end and is parsed differently by waitress leading to a potential for HTTP request smuggling. Specially crafted requests containing special whitespace characters in the Transfer-Encoding header would get parsed by Waitress as being a chunked request, but a front-end server would use the Content-Length instead as the Transfer-Encoding header is considered invalid due to containing invalid characters. If a front-end server does HTTP pipelining to a backend Waitress server this could lead to HTTP request splitting which may lead to potential cache poisoning or unexpected information disclosure. This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.1 through more strict HTTP field validation.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

December 26, 2019 CVE published
August 5, 2024 Record updated

Related vulnerabilities

04Related CVE