Waitress is a Web Server Gateway Interface server for Python 2 and 3. When using Waitress versions 2.1.0 and prior 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 Pythons 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; and Waitress does not support chunk extensions, however it was discarding them without validating that they did not contain illegal characters. This vulnerability has been patched in Waitress 2.1.1. A workaround is available. 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.
The product acts as an intermediary HTTP agent (such as a proxy or firewall) in the data flow between two entities such as a client and server, but it does not interpret malformed HTTP requests or responses in ways that are consistent with how the messages will be processed by those entities that are at the ultimate destination.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waitress | Agendaless | * | 2.1.1 (excluding) |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13.0 - ELS | RedHat | python-waitress-0:1.4.4-2.el7ost | * |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.1 | RedHat | python-waitress-0:2.0.0-1.el8ost | * |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.2 | RedHat | python-waitress-0:2.0.0-1.el8ost | * |
| Waitress | Ubuntu | devel | * |
| Waitress | Ubuntu | focal | * |
| Waitress | Ubuntu | impish | * |
| Waitress | Ubuntu | jammy | * |
| Waitress | Ubuntu | trusty | * |
| Waitress | Ubuntu | xenial | * |
HTTP requests or responses (“messages”) can be malformed or unexpected in ways that cause web servers or clients to interpret the messages in different ways than intermediary HTTP agents such as load balancers, reverse proxies, web caching proxies, application firewalls, etc. For example, an adversary may be able to add duplicate or different header fields that a client or server might interpret as one set of messages, whereas the intermediary might interpret the same sequence of bytes as a different set of messages. For example, discrepancies can arise in how to handle duplicate headers like two Transfer-encoding (TE) or two Content-length (CL), or the malicious HTTP message will have different headers for TE and CL. The inconsistent parsing and interpretation of messages can allow the adversary to “smuggle” a message to the client/server without the intermediary being aware of it. This weakness is usually the result of the usage of outdated or incompatible HTTP protocol versions in the HTTP agents.