Scrapy: S3DownloadHandler sends signed S3 requests over plaintext HTTP by default

Scrapy is a high-level web crawling and scraping framework for Python. Prior to 2.17.0, in scrapy/core/downloader/handlers/s3.py, Scrapy's S3DownloadHandler converts an S3-scheme bucket and key request into a plaintext HTTP request to the corresponding S3 endpoint unless request.meta["is_secure"] is explicitly enabled, then signs and sends the plaintext request with configured AWS credentials. A network attacker who can observe traffic between Scrapy and S3 can read the bucket and key path, AWS Authorization header, X-Amz-Security-Token when temporary credentials are used, S3 object contents, and S3 response headers. An active man-in-the-middle attacker can also modify the plaintext S3 response body, status code, and headers before Scrapy processes them, causing scraped-data poisoning, poisoned exports, HTTP cache poisoning when caching is enabled, or influence over later crawl targets through forged redirects or attacker-controlled links. Users making S3-scheme requests with AWS credentials are affected. This issue is fixed in version 2.17.0.

• Pre-auth
• Weak crypto

Published

Sep 1, 2026

Updated

Sep 9, 2026

EPSS

0.3% · 15th percentile

CWE

CWE-319