High (7.5). EPSS 2.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Fixed in waitress 1.4.0.
Waitress through version 1.3.1 implemented a "MAY" part of the RFC7230 which states: "Although the line terminator for the start-line and header fields is the sequence CRLF, a recipient MAY recognize a single LF as a line terminator and ignore any preceding CR." Unfortunately if a front-end server does not parse header fields with an LF the same way as it does those with a CRLF it can lead to the front-end and the back-end server parsing the same HTTP message in two different ways. This can lead to a potential for HTTP request smuggling/splitting whereby Waitress may see two requests while the front-end server only sees a single HTTP message. This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.0.
Severity
CVSS 3.1
7.5 high
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
EPSS
2.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days; higher than 84% of CVEs (scores of 2026-10-31)