CVE-2020-5236CWE-400

Catastrophic backtracking in regex allows Denial of Service in Waitress

Medium · published February 4, 2020

CVSS v3.1
5.7
EPSS
2%
Percentile
83.7
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.7 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.02363 · 83.7th percentile
Weakness
CWE-400 · Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
Published
2020-02-04T03:05Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 04 FEB 03:05Z
    Catastrophic backtracking in regex allows Denial of Service in Waitress
    cvelistv5