Detections
Analytics

Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2019-16786

high Nessus Plugin ID 250360

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Synopsis

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed with a vulnerability that the vendor indicates will not be patched.

Description

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

 - Waitress through version 1.3.1 would parse the Transfer-Encoding header and only look for a single string value, if that value was not chunked it would fall through and use the Content-Length header instead.
 According to the HTTP standard Transfer-Encoding should be a comma separated list, with the inner-most encoding first, followed by any further transfer codings, ending with chunked. Requests sent with:
 Transfer-Encoding: gzip, chunked would incorrectly get ignored, and the request would use a Content- Length header instead to determine the body size of the HTTP message. This could allow for Waitress to treat a single request as multiple requests in the case of HTTP pipelining. This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.0. (CVE-2019-16786)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

Solution

There is no known solution at this time.

See Also

https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2019-16786

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 250360

File Name: unpatched_CVE_2019_16786.nasl

Version: 1.1

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Misc.

Published: 8/18/2025

Updated: 8/18/2025

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3.6

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5

Temporal Score: 3.7

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2019-16786

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 6.5

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:waitress, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:16.04:-:lts, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:18.04:-:lts

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/cpu, global_settings/vendor_unpatched, Host/OS/identifier

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Vulnerability Publication Date: 12/20/2019

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2019-16786