Vulnerability: HTTP Request Parsing Issue in Waitress 1.3.1

CVE-2019-16786 · HIGH Severity

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

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.

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