Waitress vulnerable to DoS leading to high CPU usage/resource exhaustion

Impact

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.

Patches

Waitress 3.0.1 contains fixes that remove the race condition.

Workarounds

No work-around.

References

• https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/issues/418
• https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/pull/435