Vulnerabilities > CVE-2024-49768 - Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition vulnerability in Agendaless Waitress
Summary
Waitress is a Web Server Gateway Interface server for Python 2 and 3. A remote client may send a request that is exactly recv_bytes (defaults to 8192) long, followed by a secondary request using HTTP pipelining. When request lookahead is disabled (default) we won't read any more requests, and when the first request fails due to a parsing error, we simply close the connection. However when request lookahead is enabled, it is possible to process and receive the first request, start sending the error message back to the client while we read the next request and queue it. This will allow the secondary request to be serviced by the worker thread while the connection should be closed. Waitress 3.0.1 fixes the race condition. As a workaround, disable channel_request_lookahead, this is set to 0 by default disabling this feature.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 7 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Leveraging Race Conditions via Symbolic Links This attack leverages the use of symbolic links (Symlinks) in order to write to sensitive files. An attacker can create a Symlink link to a target file not otherwise accessible to her. When the privileged program tries to create a temporary file with the same name as the Symlink link, it will actually write to the target file pointed to by the attackers' Symlink link. If the attacker can insert malicious content in the temporary file she will be writing to the sensitive file by using the Symlink. The race occurs because the system checks if the temporary file exists, then creates the file. The attacker would typically create the Symlink during the interval between the check and the creation of the temporary file.
- Leveraging Time-of-Check and Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) Race Conditions This attack targets a race condition occurring between the time of check (state) for a resource and the time of use of a resource. The typical example is the file access. The attacker can leverage a file access race condition by "running the race", meaning that he would modify the resource between the first time the target program accesses the file and the time the target program uses the file. During that period of time, the attacker could do something such as replace the file and cause an escalation of privilege.