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HTTP Request Smuggling in waitress

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Mar 16, 2022 in Pylons/waitress • Updated Jan 27, 2023

Package

pip waitress (pip)

Affected versions

< 2.1.1

Patched versions

2.1.1

Description

Impact

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 use of Python's int() to parse strings into integers, leading to +10 to be parsed as 10, or 0x01 to be parsed as 1, where as the standard specifies that the string should contain only digits or hex digits.
  • Waitress does not support chunk extensions, however it was discarding them without validating that they did not contain illegal characters

Patches

This has been fixed in Waitress 2.1.1

Workarounds

When deploying a proxy in front of waitress, turning on any and all functionality to make sure that the request matches the RFC7230 standard. Certain proxy servers may not have this functionality though and users are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of waitress instead.

References

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

References

@digitalresistor digitalresistor published to Pylons/waitress Mar 16, 2022
Published by the National Vulnerability Database Mar 17, 2022
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Mar 18, 2022
Reviewed Mar 18, 2022
Last updated Jan 27, 2023

Severity

High

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
None

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

EPSS score

0.346%
(72nd percentile)

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2022-24761

GHSA ID

GHSA-4f7p-27jc-3c36

Source code

Credits

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