CVE-2020-5236

MEDIUM

Waitress 1.4.2 - Denial of Service via Invalid Header Character Processing

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Exploitation Summary

EIP tracks 1 public exploit for CVE-2020-5236. PoCs published by motikan2010.

AI-analyzed exploit summary This repository contains a functional proof-of-concept for CVE-2020-5236, a ReDoS vulnerability in Waitress 1.4.2. The exploit demonstrates how a malformed header with invalid characters triggers catastrophic backtracking in the regex engine, causing 100% CPU usage and a denial of service.

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.

Exploits (1)

nomisec WORKING POC 4 stars
by motikan2010 · poc
https://github.com/motikan2010/CVE-2020-5236

This repository contains a functional proof-of-concept for CVE-2020-5236, a ReDoS vulnerability in Waitress 1.4.2. The exploit demonstrates how a malformed header with invalid characters triggers catastrophic backtracking in the regex engine, causing 100% CPU usage and a denial of service.

Classification
Working Poc 95%
Attack Type
Dos
Complexity
Trivial
Reliability
Reliable
Target: Waitress 1.4.2
No auth needed
Prerequisites: Network access to the target server · Ability to send HTTP requests with custom headers
devstral-2 · analyzed Feb 18, 2026 Full analysis →

References (2)

Core 2

Scores

CVSS v3 5.7
EPSS 0.1333
EPSS Percentile 94.4%
Attack Vector NETWORK
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Details

CWE
CWE-400
Status published
Products (2)
agendaless/waitress 1.4.2
pypi/waitress 1.4.2 - 1.4.3PyPI
Published Feb 04, 2020
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026