CVE-2024-49768: agendaless waitress

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2024-49768 is a critical (CVSS 9.1) vulnerability in agendaless waitress. EPSS estimates a 0.49% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 40.5% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 29-10-2024
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 29-10-2024
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Waitress is a Web Server Gateway Interface server for Python 2 and 3. A remote client may send a request that is exactly recv_bytes (defaults to 8192) long, followed by a secondary request using HTTP pipelining. When request lookahead is disabled (default) we won't read any more requests, and when the first request fails due to a parsing error, we simply close the connection. However when request lookahead is enabled, it is possible to process and receive the first request, start sending the error message back to the client while we read the next request and queue it. This will allow the secondary request to be serviced by the worker thread while the connection should be closed. Waitress 3.0.1 fixes the race condition. As a workaround, disable channel_request_lookahead, this is set to 0 by default disabling this feature.

• CWE-367Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race ConditionThe product checks the state of a resource before using that resource, but the resource's state can change between the check and the use in a way that invalidates the results of the check.
• CWE-444Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests ('HTTP Request/Response Smuggling')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.