What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2019-16786: HTTP Request Smuggling: Invalid Transfer-Encoding in Waitress
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 2.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2019-12-20 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-444
Description
Waitress through version 1.3.1 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. This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.0.
Affected products
- Pylons Waitress: before 1.3.1 — fixed in 1.3.1
- Debian Linux: 9.0
- Fedoraproject Fedora: 30, 31
- Oracle Communications Cloud Native Core Network Function Cloud Native Environment: 1.10.0
- OpenStack: 15
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: Pylons Waitress 1.3.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2020:0720
- https://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/waitress/en/latest/#security-fixes
- https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/commit/f11093a6b3240fc26830b6111e826128af7771c3
- https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/security/advisories/GHSA-g2xc-35jw-c63p
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/05/msg00011.html
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/GVDHR2DNKCNQ7YQXISJ45NT4IQDX3LJ7/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/LYEOTGWJZVKPRXX2HBNVIYWCX73QYPM5/
- https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuapr2022.html
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2020:0720
- https://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/waitress/en/latest/#security-fixes
- https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/commit/f11093a6b3240fc26830b6111e826128af7771c3
- https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/security/advisories/GHSA-g2xc-35jw-c63p
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