Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting waitress package, versions [2.1.0,2.1.2)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    0.19% (57th percentile)

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications
  • Snyk ID SNYK-PYTHON-WAITRESS-2849631
  • published 1 Jun 2022
  • disclosed 1 Jun 2022
  • credit oakkitten

How to fix?

Upgrade waitress to version 2.1.2 or higher.

Overview

waitress is a production-quality pure-Python WSGI server with very acceptable performance.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to a race condition that may cause early termination when a thread closes a socket while the main thread is about to call select(). This will lead to the main thread raising an exception that is not handled, resulting in the entire application being killed.

Note: Users using waitress behind a reverse proxy server are less likely to have issues if the reverse proxy always reads the full response.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

CVSS Scores

version 3.1
Expand this section

Snyk

Recommended
6.5 medium
  • Attack Vector (AV)
    Network
  • Attack Complexity (AC)
    Low
  • Privileges Required (PR)
    Low
  • User Interaction (UI)
    None
  • Scope (S)
    Unchanged
  • Confidentiality (C)
    None
  • Integrity (I)
    None
  • Availability (A)
    High
Expand this section

NVD

5.9 medium
Expand this section

Red Hat

5.3 medium