Waitress

Waitress is a Web Server Gateway Interface server for Python 2 and 3. When a remote client closes the connection before waitress has had the opportunity to call getpeername() waitress won't correctly clean up the connection leading to the main thread attempting to write to a socket that no longer exists, but not removing it from the list of sockets to attempt to process. This leads to a busy-loop calling the write function. A remote attacker could run waitress out of available sockets with very little resources required. Waitress 3.0.1 contains fixes that remove the race condition.

Published: 2024-10-29T14:18:40.951Z
Updated: 2024-11-17T00:11:26.954Z

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.

Published: 2024-10-29T14:32:25.164Z
Updated: 2024-10-29T14:56:02.111Z

Waitress is a Web Server Gateway Interface server for Python 2 and 3. Waitress versions 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 may terminate early due to a thread closing a socket while the main thread is about to call select(). This will lead to the main thread raising an exception that is not handled and then causing the entire application to be killed. This issue has been fixed in Waitress 2.1.2 by no longer allowing the WSGI thread to close the socket. Instead, that is always delegated to the main thread. There is no work-around for this issue. However, users using waitress behind a reverse proxy server are less likely to have issues if the reverse proxy always reads the full response.

Published: 2022-05-31T22:50:12.000Z
Updated: 2025-04-22T17:55:26.641Z

Waitress is a Web Server Gateway Interface server for Python 2 and 3. When using Waitress versions 2.1.0 and prior behind a proxy that does not properly validate the incoming HTTP request matches the RFC7230 standard, Waitress and the frontend proxy may disagree on where one request starts and where it ends. This would allow requests to be smuggled via the front-end proxy to waitress and later behavior. There are two classes of vulnerability that may lead to request smuggling that are addressed by this advisory: The use of Python's `int()` to parse strings into integers, leading to `+10` to be parsed as `10`, or `0x01` to be parsed as `1`, where as the standard specifies that the string should contain only digits or hex digits; and Waitress does not support chunk extensions, however it was discarding them without validating that they did not contain illegal characters. This vulnerability has been patched in Waitress 2.1.1. A workaround is available. When deploying a proxy in front of waitress, turning on any and all functionality to make sure that the request matches the RFC7230 standard. Certain proxy servers may not have this functionality though and users are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of waitress instead.

Published: 2022-03-17T12:40:10.000Z
Updated: 2025-04-23T18:46:46.567Z

Waitress through version 1.3.1 allows request smuggling by sending the Content-Length header twice. Waitress would header fold a double Content-Length header and due to being unable to cast the now comma separated value to an integer would set the Content-Length to 0 internally. If two Content-Length headers are sent in a single request, Waitress would treat the request as having no body, thereby treating the body of the request as a new request in HTTP pipelining. This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.0.

Published: 2020-01-22T18:30:15.000Z
Updated: 2024-08-05T01:24:48.422Z