What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2019-16789: HTTP Request Smuggling in Waitress: Invalid whitespace characters in headers
- Severity: high (CVSS 8.2 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 2.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2019-12-26 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-444
Description
In Waitress through version 1.4.0, if a proxy server is used in front of waitress, an invalid request may be sent by an attacker that bypasses the front-end and is parsed differently by waitress leading to a potential for HTTP request smuggling. Specially crafted requests containing special whitespace characters in the Transfer-Encoding header would get parsed by Waitress as being a chunked request, but a front-end server would use the Content-Length instead as the Transfer-Encoding header is considered invalid due to containing invalid characters. If a front-end server does HTTP pipelining to a backend Waitress server this could lead to HTTP request splitting which may lead to potential cache poisoning or unexpected information disclosure. This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.1 through more strict HTTP field validation.
Affected products
- Pylons Waitress: through 1.4.0
- Debian Linux: 9.0
- Fedoraproject Fedora: 30, 31
- Oracle Communications Cloud Native Core Network Function Cloud Native Environment: 1.10.0
- OpenStack: 15
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/11d9e138125ad46e951027184b13242a3c1de017
- https://github.com/github/advisory-review/pull/14604
- 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/11d9e138125ad46e951027184b13242a3c1de017
- https://github.com/github/advisory-review/pull/14604
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