Alex Gaynor reports:

""" When Python's standard library HTTP clients (httplib, urllib, urllib2, xmlrpclib) are used to access resources with HTTPS, by default the certificate is not checked against any trust store, nor is the hostname in the certificate checked against the requested host. It was possible to configure a trust root to be checked against, however there were no faculties for hostname checking.

This made MITM attacks against the HTTP clients trivial, and violated RFC 2818 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2818#section-3).

Python 2.7.9 has been issued to resolve this issue. It is also resolved in 3.4.3, which has not yet been released. """

CVE request: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q4/1022

A CRLF injection flaw was discovered in python in the way URLs are handled when doing an HTTP/HTTPS connection (e.g. through urlopen() or HTTPConnection). An attacker who can control the url parameter passed to urlopen method in the urllib/urllib2 modules can inject CRLF sequences and HTTP headers by abusing the "host" part of the URL.

An issue was discovered in urllib2 in Python 2.x through 2.7.16 and urllib in Python 3.x through 3.7.2. CRLF injection is possible if the attacker controls a url parameter, as demonstrated by the first argument to urllib.request.urlopen with \r\n followed by an HTTP header or a Redis command.

Reference: https://bugs.python.org/issue36276

CVE-2018-20852 http.cookiejar.DefaultPolicy.domainreturnok in Lib/http/cookiejar.py in Python before 3.7.3 does not correctly validate the domain: it can be tricked into sending existing cookies to the wrong server. An attacker may abuse this flaw by using a server with a hostname that has another valid hostname as a suffix (e.g., pythonicexample.com to steal cookies for example.com). When a program uses http.cookiejar.DefaultPolicy and tries to do an HTTP connection to an attacker-controlled server, existing cookies can be leaked to the attacker. This affects 2.x through 2.7.16, 3.x before 3.4.10, 3.5.x before 3.5.7, 3.6.x before 3.6.9, and 3.7.x before 3.7.3. CVE-2014-4616 Array index error in the scanstring function in the json module in Python 2.7 through 3.5 and simplejson before 2.6.1 allows context-dependent attackers to read arbitrary process memory via a negative index value in the idx argument to the rawdecode function. CVE-2013-7040 Python 2.7 before 3.4 only uses the last eight bits of the prefix to randomize hash values, which causes it to compute hash values without restricting the ability to trigger hash collisions predictably and makes it easier for context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) via crafted input to an application that maintains a hash table. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2012-1150.

Julian Wälde and Alexander Klink reported a flaw in the hash function used in the implementation of the Python dictionaries (associative arrays).

A specially-crafted set of keys could trigger hash function collisions, which degrade dictionary performance by changing hash table operations complexity from an expected/average O(1) to the worst case O(n). Reporters were able to find colliding strings efficiently using meet in the middle attack.

As various web application frameworks for Python automatically pre-fill certain dictionaries with data from the HTTP request (such as GET or POST parameters) for Python web application, a remote attacker could use this flaw to make Python interpreter use excessive amount of CPU time by sending a POST request with large amount of parameters which hash to the same value.

This problem is similar to the issue that was previously reported for and fixed in e.g. perl: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/hash/CrosbyWallachUsenixSec2003.pdf

Last updated 25 August 2025