CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-32681

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: May 26, 2023 | Modified: Sep 17, 2023
CVSS 3.x
6.1
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Requests is a HTTP library. Since Requests 2.3.0, Requests has been leaking Proxy-Authorization headers to destination servers when redirected to an HTTPS endpoint. This is a product of how we use rebuild_proxies to reattach the Proxy-Authorization header to requests. For HTTP connections sent through the tunnel, the proxy will identify the header in the request itself and remove it prior to forwarding to the destination server. However when sent over HTTPS, the Proxy-Authorization header must be sent in the CONNECT request as the proxy has no visibility into the tunneled request. This results in Requests forwarding proxy credentials to the destination server unintentionally, allowing a malicious actor to potentially exfiltrate sensitive information. This issue has been patched in version 2.31.0.

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Requests Python 2.3.0 *

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References