debian · CVE-2020-5236

Quick triage

Priority: unimportant Published: Updated: Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:09:35 GMT

View at Official debian advisory, NVD, CVE.org · CVE detail

Freshness: upstream tracker timestamp is available; use API updated time as primary recency signal.

Tracker summary

CVE-2020-5236 unimportant priority: Debian including 1 source packages (waitress), 5 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5.

Description:

Waitress version 1.4.2 allows a DOS attack When waitress receives a header that contains invalid characters. When a header like "Bad-header: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\x10" is received, it will cause the regular expression engine to catastrophically backtrack causing the process to use 100% CPU time and blocking any other interactions. This allows an attacker to send a single request with an invalid header and take the service offline. This issue was introduced in version 1.4.2 when the regular expression was updated to attempt to match the behaviour required by errata associated with RFC7230. The regular expression that is used to validate incoming headers has been updated in version 1.4.3, it is recommended that people upgrade to the new version of Waitress as soon as possible.

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