Versions 1.17 and 1.18 of the Python urllib3 library suffer from a vulnerability that can cause them, in certain configurations, to not correctly validate TLS certificates. This places users of the library with those configurations at risk of man-in-the-middle and information leakage attacks. This vulnerability affects users using versions 1.17 and 1.18 of the urllib3 library, who are using the optional PyOpenSSL support for TLS instead of the regular standard library TLS backend, and who are using OpenSSL 1.1.0 via PyOpenSSL. This is an extremely uncommon configuration, so the security impact of this vulnerability is low.

Impact

Users who are using an HTTPS proxy to issue HTTPS requests and haven't configured their own SSLContext via proxyconfig. Only the default SSLContext is impacted.

Patches

urllib3 >=1.26.4 has the issue resolved. urllib3<1.26 is not impacted due to not supporting HTTPS requests via HTTPS proxies.

Workarounds

Upgrading is recommended as this is a minor release and not likely to break current usage.

Configuring an SSLContext with checkhostname=True and passing via proxyconfig instead of relying on the default SSLContext

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