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GHSA-g2xc-35jw-c63p

HTTP Request Smuggling: Invalid Transfer-Encoding in Waitress

Source: GitHub Advisory Database (reviewed) Moderate CVE-2019-16786

Packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixed in
PyPI waitress < 1.4.0 1.4.0

Details

As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).

### Impact 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 use a `Content-Length` header instead to determine the body size of the HTTP message. This could allow for Waitress to treat a single request as multiple requests in the case of HTTP pipelining. ### Patches This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.0. This brings a range of changes to harden Waitress against potential HTTP request confusions, and may change the behaviour of Waitress behind non-conformist proxies. Waitress will now return a 501 Not Implemented error if the `Transfer-Encoding` is not `chunked` or contains multiple elements. Waitress does not support any transfer codings such as `gzip` or `deflate`. The Pylons Project recommends upgrading as soon as possible, while validating that the changes in Waitress don&#39;t cause any changes in behavior. ### Workarounds Various reverse proxies may have protections against sending potentially bad HTTP requests to the backend, and or hardening against potential issues like this. If the reverse proxy doesn&#39;t use HTTP/1.1 for connecting to the backend issues are also somewhat mitigated, as HTTP pipelining does not exist in HTTP/1.0 and Waitress will close the connection after every single request (unless the Keep Alive header is explicitly sent... so this is not a fool proof security method). ### Issues/more security issues: * open an issue at https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/issues (if not sensitive or security related) * email the Pylons Security mailing list: [email protected] (if security related)

References

External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.