The urlparse function in Python urllib returns the wrong hostname when parsing URL crafted by the malicious user. This may be caused by incorrect handling of IPv6 addresses. The bug could lead to open redirect in web applications which rely on urlparse to extract and validate the domain of redirection URL.

The test case is as follows:

>> from urllib.parse import urlparse
>> urlparse(urlparse('http://benign.com\\[attacker.com]').hostname
>> 'attacker.com'

The correct behavior should be raising an invalid URL exception.

I can confirm with 3.7.2 on fedora 29

Here is a unittest where you can test this issue and the result on Python 3.8.0a2 and 3.7.2

>>> 3.8.0a2
./python /tmp/test_bug_36338.py
/tmp/test_bug_36338.py:8: SyntaxWarning: invalid escape sequence \[
  url = 'http://demo.com\[attacker.com]'
3.8.0a2+ (heads/master:23581c018f, Mar 18 2019, 09:17:05) 
[GCC 8.3.1 20190223 (Red Hat 8.3.1-2)]
test_bad_url (__main__.TestUrlparse) ... FAIL

======================================================================
FAIL: test_bad_url (main.TestUrlparse)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/test_bug_36338.py", line 13, in test_bad_url
    self.assertEqual(hostname, expected_hostname)
AssertionError: 'attacker.com' != 'demo.com'
- attacker.com
+ demo.com

Ran 1 test in 0.001s

FAILED (failures=1)

>>> 3.7.2
python /tmp/test_bug_36338.py
3.7.2 (default, Jan 16 2019, 19:49:22) 
[GCC 8.2.1 20181215 (Red Hat 8.2.1-6)]
test_bad_url (__main__.TestUrlparse) ... FAIL

======================================================================
FAIL: test_bad_url (main.TestUrlparse)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/test_bug_36338.py", line 13, in test_bad_url
    self.assertEqual(hostname, expected_hostname)
AssertionError: 'attacker.com' != 'demo.com'
- attacker.com
+ demo.com

Ran 1 test in 0.000s

FAILED (failures=1)

See also bpo-20271 that discusses the other format http://[::1]spam where ::1 is returned as hostname. urlparse tries to parse the hostname as IPV6 address when there is [ and parses till ] at [0] thus "benign.com\[attacker.com]" is treated as a URL where attacker.com is assumed as the IPV6 hostname. I am not sure of the correct behavior. FWIW at least Java and golang return "benign.com[attacker.com]" and Ruby raises an exception that this is a bad URL.

Java

(.getHost (java.net.URL. "http://benign.com\\\\[attacker.com]"))
"benign.com\\[attacker.com]"

golang: https://play.golang.org/p/q8pTo9ySLby

[0]

Given a quick scan of RFC 3986[1] I'd say that the behaviour of Ruby seems to be the most correct. That said, I'd also check what the major browsers do in this case (FWIW both FF and Safari use 'benign.com' as the hostname in this case).

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#page-17

I found this page to be uesful : https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#host-parsing and following the steps it seems that this should raise an error since at the 7th step it denotes that asciiDomain shouldn't contain forbidden host code point including "[]" . As another data point using 'new URL("http://benign.com[attacker.com]")' in browser's Javascript console also raises exception that this is a bad URL. Even if attacker.com is assumed to be the correct host by Python it's not validated to be an IPV6 address where it should fail.

Ruby seems to use a regex : https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/lib/uri/rfc3986_parser.rb#L6
Java parseurl : http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/file/c4c225b49c5f/src/java.base/share/classes/java/net/URLStreamHandler.java#l124
golang : https://github.com/golang/go/blob/50bd1c4d4eb4fac8ddeb5f063c099daccfb71b26/src/net/url/url.go#L587

Python2 urlparse.urlparse and urllib2.urlparse.urlparse have a similar IPv6 hostname parsing bug.

>> urlparse.urlparse('http://nevil.com[]').hostname
>> 'evil.com['

This is less practical to exploit since the parsed domain contains a '[' in the end.

Do I need to create a separate issue for this Python2 bug?

I think the way PR 14896 fix the python3 bug can also be applied to this.

Also, do we need a CVE ID for the python3 bug? As it may lead to some security issues in some Python apps, e.g., open-redirect. I have found such a case in a private bug bounty program.

The guidelines https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#host-parsing make a lot of sense to me. Python should refuse hostnames with "[" unless

• the hostname starts with "["
• the hostname ends with "]"
• the string between [] is a valid IPv6 address (full or shortened, without or with correctly quoted scope id)

Python should refuse any hostname with forbidden chars "\x00\n\r #%/:?@", too.

To be clear, the \ in 'http://benign.com\\[attacker.com]' is not needed to reproduce the bug:

vstinner@apu$ python3 
Python 3.7.4 (default, Jul  9 2019, 16:32:37) 
>>> from urllib.parse import urlparse; print(urlparse('http://demo.com[attacker.com]').hostname)
attacker.com

Python 3.5 and newer are impacted, but Python 2.7 behaves differently:

vstinner@apu$ python2
Python 2.7.16 (default, Apr 30 2019, 15:54:43) 
>>> from urlparse import urlparse
>>> urlparse('http://demo.com[attacker.com]').hostname
'emo.com[attacker.com'

I proposed PR 16780 which makes the urllib.parse module way more stricter:

• the IPv6 address is validated by ipaddress.IPv6Address() parser
• invalid characters are rejected in the IPv6 zone: "%", "[" and "]"
• the port number is now validated when parsing the URL: must be an integer in the [0; 65535] range

Sadly, validating using ipaddress.IPv6Address() cannot be easily ported to Python 2 which doesn't have this module.

I modified my PR 16780 to also fix bpo-33342: "urllib IPv6 parsing fails with special characters in passwords".

OMG parsing an URL is a can of worms... There are so many open issues related to URL parsing!

• bpo-18191: urllib.parse.splitport("::1")
• bpo-20271: urllib.parse.urlparse('http://[::1]spam:80')
• bpo-28841: urlparse.urlparse() parses invalid URI without generating an error (examples provided)
• bpo-33342: urlsplit("//user:[@host")
• bpo-34360: 'http://[::1]]'
• bpo-35377: urlparse doesn't validate the scheme
• bpo-35748: 'http://www.google.com\\@xxx.com'
• bpo-36338 (this issue): urlparse('http://demo.com[attacker.com]')
• bpo-37678: urlparse('http://user:pass#?[word@example.com:80/path')

Related:

• bpo-3647: urlparse - relative url parsing and joins to be RFC3986 compliance
• bpo-16909: urlparse: add userinfo attribute
• bpo-18140: issue with 'http://auser:secr#et@192.168.0.1:8080/a/b/c.html'
• bpo-22234: urllib.parse.urlparse accepts any falsy value as an url
• bpo-22852: "urllib.parse wrongly strips empty #fragment, ?query, //netloc"
• bpo-23328: issue with "http://someuser:a/b@10.11.12.13:1234"
• bpo-23448: "urllib2 needs to remove scope from IPv6 address when creating Host header"
• bpo-23505: [CVE-2015-2104] Urlparse insufficient validation leads to open redirect

There are 124 open issues with "urllib" in their title and 12 open issues with "urlparse" in their title.

It produces a deprecation warning on 3.11, but still does the same.

>>> urlparse('http://benign.com\[attacker.com]').hostname
<stdin>:1: DeprecationWarning: invalid escape sequence '\['
'attacker.com'