GHSA-m5ff-3wj3-8ph4 — HTTP Request Smuggling: Invalid whitespace characters in headers in Waitress

Affected: PyPI: waitress

### Impact

If a proxy server is used in front of waitress, an invalid request may be sent by an attacker that bypasses the front-end and is parsed differently by waitress leading to a potential for HTTP request smuggling.

``` Content-Length: 10 Transfer-Encoding: [\x0b]chunked ```

For clarity:

``` 0x0b == vertical tab ```

Would get parsed by Waitress as being a `chunked` request, but a front-end server would use the `Content-Length` instead as the `Transfer-Encoding` header is considered invalid due to containing invalid characters.

If a front-end server does HTTP pipelining to a backend Waitress server this could lead to HTTP request splitting which may lead to potential cache poisoning or unexpected information disclosure.

### Patches

Please upgrade to Waitress 1.4.1 which fixes this issue with stricter HTTP field validation.

Waitress 1.4.1 due to this change has become much more strict in what is allowed in header values, while the maintainers don't believe that these changes will cause any issues, it may cause failures with non-conformist reverse proxies or clients, and it is highly recommend that users validate the changes in their environment and make sure it won't cause any unacceptable failures.

### Workarounds

You may enable additional protections on front-end servers, those that follow RFC7230 correctly would drop the request with a 400 Bad Request.

Waitress will now correctly responds to the request with a 400 Bad Request, and will drop the connection…

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GHSA-m5ff-3wj3-8ph4 — HTTP Request Smuggling: Invalid whitespace characters in headers in Waitress