Catastrophic backtracking in regex allows Denial of Service in Waitress

Affected versions

NVD version ranges (for catalog products). Add the product to your stack with a version and matching uses these.

• agendaless waitress1.4.2

Versions reported by the vendor

Affected version ranges reported by the assigning authority (GitHub_M). Independent of NVD's CPE analysis and usually ahead of it.

• Pylons Waitress

  • = 1.4.2affected

Package-level exposure

OSV and GitHub Advisory data: ecosystem, package and range. SBOM matching uses this table.

Other highest-scoring records for the same primary product.

• CVE-2019-16789HTTP Request Smuggling in Waitress: Invalid whitespace characters in headers
  33Monitor
• CVE-2022-24761HTTP Request Smuggling in waitress
  31Monitor
• CVE-2019-16792HTTP Request Smuggling: Content-Length Sent Twice in Waitress
  31Monitor
• CVE-2019-16786HTTP Request Smuggling: Invalid Transfer-Encoding in Waitress
  31Monitor
• CVE-2019-16785HTTP Request Smuggling: LF vs CRLF handling in Waitress
  31Monitor
• CVE-2024-49769Waitress has a denial of service leading to high CPU usage/resource exhaustion
  30Monitor

FIRST EPSS daily score; only changes of 0.01 or more are recorded (step chart).

Root cause

Code that parses nested structures sets no depth or size limit. A small input can turn into a disproportionate processing load.

A representative example of this vulnerability class. Not the vendor's source code; it shows the faulty pattern and its fix.

1function expand(node) {2  return node.children.map(expand);3}

1const MAX_DEPTH = 32;2function expand(node, depth = 0) {3  if (depth > MAX_DEPTH) throw new Error("too deep");4  return node.children.map((c) => expand(c, depth + 1));5}

Attack context

MITRE CAPEC attack patterns and ATT&CK techniques for this weakness class (CWE). A starting point for detection rules and threat hunting.