Threat Intelligence Database

Starlette versions prior to 1.3.0 contain a vulnerability where the HTTP request path is not properly validated before being used to reconstruct the request URL. This flaw allows an attacker to supply a request path that does not start with a slash, causing the URL parser to misinterpret the path as part of the hostname. This can lead to an attacker-controlled hostname in request.url.hostname, potentially misleading security-sensitive logic relying on this value. The vulnerability is addressed by upgrading to a fixed version that correctly validates and reconstructs the URL.

Starlette versions 1.0.1 and below have a vulnerability in HTTPEndpoint where arbitrary HTTP methods can invoke unintended internal methods if routes are registered without explicit HTTP method constraints. This affects applications using HTTPEndpoint subclasses via Route(...) without specifying allowed methods, potentially impacting frameworks built on Starlette such as FastAPI. The vulnerability has a medium severity with a CVSS score of 5.3.

### Summary In affected versions, the HTTP `Host` request header was not validated before being used to reconstruct `request.url`. Because the routing algorithm relies on the raw HTTP path while `request.url` is rebuilt from the `Host` header, a malformed header could make `request.url.path` differ from the path that was actually requested. Middleware and endpoints that apply security restrictions based on `request.url` (rather than the raw `scope` path) could therefore be bypassed. ### Details When a client requests `http://example.com/foo`, it sends: ```http GET /foo HTTP/1.1 Host: example.com ``` Affected versions reconstructed the URL by concatenating `http://{host}{path}` and re-parsing the result. The `Host` value is only valid as a `uri-host [ ":" port ]` per [RFC 9112 §3.2](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9112.html#section-3.2-6), where `uri-host` follows the restricted `host` grammar of [RFC 3986 §3.2.2](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986.html#section-3.2.2). When it contains characters outside that grammar - notably `/`, `?`, or `#` - those characters move the path/query/fragment boundaries during re-parsing, so the parsed `request.url.path` no longer matches the path the server actually received. For example: ```http GET /foo HTTP/1.1 Host: example.com/abc?bar= ``` reconstructs to `http://example.com/abc?bar=/foo`, whose parsed `path` is `/abc` - even though routing used the real path `/foo`. The router still dispatches to `/foo` and the endpoint executes, but any middleware or code that reads `request.url.path` sees `/abc`, so path-based authorization checks can be bypassed. ### Impact Any application running an affected version that relies on `request.url` (or `request.url.path`) for security-sensitive decisions is affected. The most common case is middleware that gates access to certain path prefixes based on `request.url.path`. Deployments fronted by a proxy or load balancer are mitigated only if that proxy rejects or normalizes the malformed `Host` header before forwarding and the application does not trust attacker-controlled host headers (e.g. `X-Forwarded-Host`) elsewhere. ### Mitigation Upgrade to a patched version, which validates the `Host` header against the grammar of [RFC 9112 §3.2](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9112.html#section-3.2-6) / [RFC 3986 §3.2.2](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986.html#section-3.2.2) when constructing `request.url` and falls back to `scope["server"]` for malformed values.