CVE-2021-21240

Publication date 8 February 2021

Last updated 26 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

httplib2 is a comprehensive HTTP client library for Python. In httplib2 before version 0.19.0, a malicious server which responds with long series of "\xa0" characters in the "www-authenticate" header may cause Denial of Service (CPU burn while parsing header) of the httplib2 client accessing said server. This is fixed in version 0.19.0 which contains a new implementation of auth headers parsing using the pyparsing library.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
python-httplib2	25.10 questing	Not affected
	25.04 plucky	Not affected
	24.10 oracular	Not affected
	24.04 LTS noble	Not affected
	23.10 mantic	Not affected
	23.04 lunar	Not affected
	22.10 kinetic	Ignored end of life, was needed
	22.04 LTS jammy	Vulnerable
	21.10 impish	Ignored end of life
	21.04 hirsute	Ignored end of life
	20.10 groovy	Ignored end of life
	20.04 LTS focal	Vulnerable
	18.04 LTS bionic	Vulnerable
	16.04 LTS xenial	Vulnerable
	14.04 LTS trusty	Vulnerable

Notes

mdeslaur

patch will introduce dependency on the pyparsing package

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
python-httplib2	Upstream: bd9ee25

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	7.5 · High
Attack vector	Network
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	None
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H