Vulnerability in Agendaless Waitress

CVE-2019-16786

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.

Vulnerability class: HTTP Request Smuggling

EPSS: 0.025 (83.4th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.1 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:N.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2019-16786?
CVE-2019-16786 is a high-severity vulnerability in Agendaless Waitress, classified under Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests (HTTP Request/Response Smuggling). CVSS score: 7.1/10. Published 2019-12-20.
How severe is CVE-2019-16786?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.1 out of 10.
Is CVE-2019-16786 known to be exploited?
1 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.