GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI

GHSA-4ppp-gpcr-7qf6 HTTP Request Smuggling: Content-Length Sent Twice in Waitress

CRITICAL Published 2019-12-20 Modified 2026-01-22 Official page ↗
Aliases
CVE-2019-16792
Ecosystem
PyPI
Packages
waitress
Severity
Critical
Weaknesses
CWE-444
Reviewed
2019-12-20

Affected packages

• PyPI waitress: < 1.4.0 → fixed in 1.4.0

Description

Impact 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. So a request with: ``` Content-Length: 10 Content-Length: 10 ``` would get transformed to: ``` Content-Length: 10, 10 ``` Which would Waitress would then internally set to `Content-Lenght: 0`. Waitress would then treat the request as having no body, thereby treating the body of the request as a new request in 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. The Pylons Project recommends upgrading as soon as possible, while validating that the changes in Waitress don'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'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)

Related

Alias · CVE (1)

  • CVE-2019-16792 Waitress through version 1.3.1 allows request smuggling by sending the Content-Length header twice. vulnerability

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-444 Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests weakness

References