CVE-2019-16786

HTTP Request Smuggling: Invalid Transfer-Encoding in Waitress

HIGH
7.5
CVSS Score
Published: December 20, 2019 at 11:00 PM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 02:22 AM UTC
6 products affected across 6 vendorsDebian LinuxFedoraOpenStack

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Severity
HIGH7.5
Exploit prediction
EPSS 2%

Description

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.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

v < 1.3.1
Affected range stops below 1.3.1, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
<= 1.3.1 ≤ v ≤ 1.3.1<= 1.3.1

CVSS

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
HIGH
Availability
NONE
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-444

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