Impact

If you use HttpAuthMiddleware (i.e. the httpuser and httppass spider attributes) for HTTP authentication, all requests will expose your credentials to the request target.

This includes requests generated by Scrapy components, such as robots.txt requests sent by Scrapy when the ROBOTSTXTOBEY setting is set to True, or as requests reached through redirects.

Patches

Upgrade to Scrapy 2.5.1 and use the new httpauthdomain spider attribute to control which domains are allowed to receive the configured HTTP authentication credentials.

If you are using Scrapy 1.8 or a lower version, and upgrading to Scrapy 2.5.1 is not an option, you may upgrade to Scrapy 1.8.1 instead.

Workarounds

If you cannot upgrade, set your HTTP authentication credentials on a per-request basis, using for example the w3lib.http.basicauthheader function to convert your credentials into a value that you can assign to the Authorization header of your request, instead of defining your credentials globally using HttpAuthMiddleware.

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