Vulnerabilities > CVE-2024-49769 - Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in Agendaless Waitress

047910
CVSS 7.5 - HIGH
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
HIGH
network
low complexity
agendaless
CWE-772

Summary

Waitress is a Web Server Gateway Interface server for Python 2 and 3. When a remote client closes the connection before waitress has had the opportunity to call getpeername() waitress won't correctly clean up the connection leading to the main thread attempting to write to a socket that no longer exists, but not removing it from the list of sockets to attempt to process. This leads to a busy-loop calling the write function. A remote attacker could run waitress out of available sockets with very little resources required. Waitress 3.0.1 contains fixes that remove the race condition.

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • HTTP DoS
    An attacker performs flooding at the HTTP level to bring down only a particular web application rather than anything listening on a TCP/IP connection. This denial of service attack requires substantially fewer packets to be sent which makes DoS harder to detect. This is an equivalent of SYN flood in HTTP. The idea is to keep the HTTP session alive indefinitely and then repeat that hundreds of times. This attack targets resource depletion weaknesses in web server software. The web server will wait to attacker's responses on the initiated HTTP sessions while the connection threads are being exhausted.