CVE-2019-16789

mediumpriority · track · 34EPSS 0.026 · 85 %ileEURUUS
grimoire priorityP3 · Track
Exploitable?
—
no known exploitation
Likely / severe?
2.59% (85th) EPSS
CVSS 6.4 · medium
Is it mine?
17 products
Check your exposure
Who says so?
5 sources
cnnvd · enisa_euvd · fstec_bdu · osv

EPSS · scored 2026-10-27

In Waitress through version 1.4.0, 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. Specially crafted requests containing special whitespace characters in the Transfer-Encoding header 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. This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.1 through more strict HTTP field validation.

01

cvss

Technical severity, 0–10. One row per scoring source.

8.2
010

base score 0–10 · higher = more severe · hover a vector to decode⚠ sources disagree · medium–high · 6.4–8.2

v2.06.4mediumAV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:Nprimary · NVD / NIST USexploitability 10 · impact 4.9
v3.18.2highCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:Nprimary · NVD / NIST USexploitability 3.9 · impact 4.2
v3.18.2highAV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:Nsecondary · FSTEC (BDU) RU
v3.17.1highCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:Nsecondary · ENISA EU
v3.17.1highCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:Nsecondary · security-advisories@github.comexploitability 1.8 · impact 4.7
v3.17.1highCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:Nsecondary · OSV
v3.17.5highCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:N/E:Usecondary · CVSS-BT (t0sche)
02

weaknesses

The CWE weakness classes this flaw belongs to.

03

affected products (17)

Products and version ranges known to be affected.

04

advisories (2)

Vendor and ecosystem advisories describing this.

  • GHSA-968f-66r5-5v74HTTP Request Smuggling in Waitress: Invalid whitespace characters in headers (Follow-up)2020-01-06ghsa · osvUS

    ### Impact The patches introduced to fix https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/security/advisories/GHSA-m5ff-3wj3-8ph4 were not complete and still would allow an attacker to smuggle requests/split a HTTP request with invalid data. This updates the existing CVE with ID: CVE-2019-16789 ### Patches Waitress version 1.4.2 has been updated to now validate HTTP headers better to avoid the issue, completely fixing all known issues with whitespace. ### Workarounds There are no work-arounds, upgrading to Waitress 1.4.2 is highly recommended. ### References See https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/security/advisories/GHSA-m5ff-3wj3-8ph4 for more information on the security issue. ### For more information If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: * open an issue at https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/issues (if not sensitive or security related) * email the Pylons Security mailing list: pylons-project-security@googlegroups.com (if security related)

  • PYSEC-2019-1382019-12-26vendor · osvUS

    In Waitress through version 1.4.0, 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. Specially crafted requests containing special whitespace characters in the Transfer-Encoding header 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. This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.1 through more strict HTTP field validation.

05

also known as (7)

Other names and identifiers for this entity.

06

sources

Which sources assert this record, and when.

published 2019-12-26modified 2026-06-17
08

references (34)

External citations — patches, advisories, analysis.

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