CVE-2020-5236

Catastrophic backtracking in regex allows Denial of Service in Waitress

Published Feb 4, 2020 CVSS 3.1 · 5.7 Medium EPSS 2.4% KEV · Not listed
Description
Waitress version 1.4.2 allows a DOS attack When waitress receives a header that contains invalid characters. When a header like "Bad-header: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\x10" is received, it will cause the regular expression engine to catastrophically backtrack causing the process to use 100% CPU time and blocking any other interactions. This allows an attacker to send a single request with an invalid header and take the service offline. This issue was introduced in version 1.4.2 when the regular expression was updated to attempt to match the behaviour required by errata associated with RFC7230. The regular expression that is used to validate incoming headers has been updated in version 1.4.3, it is recommended that people upgrade to the new version of Waitress as soon as possible.

Remediation

No solution or workaround provided in the CVE record

Tracking

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Advisories

Source ID Title
Github GHSA Github GHSA GHSA-73m2-3pwg-5fgc Catastrophic backtracking in regex allows Denial of Service in Waitress
History

No history.

Weaknesses

Sources

Status
PUBLISHED
Assigner
GitHub_M
Published
Updated
Aug 4, 2024, 8:22 AM
Reserved
Jan 2, 2020, 12:00 AM
Status
Modified
Published
Feb 4, 2020, 3:15 AM
Modified
Jun 17, 2026, 3:21 AM
Severity
Moderate
Public date
Feb 3, 2020, 12:00 AM