CVE-2021-41125 HTTP authentication credential leak to target websites in scrapy

What is CVE-2021-41125?

CVE-2021-41125 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 6 Oct 2021. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Scrapy is a high-level web crawling and scraping framework for Python. If you use `HttpAuthMiddleware` (i.e. the `http_user` and `http_pass` 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 `ROBOTSTXT_OBEY` setting is set to `True`, or as requests reached through redirects. Upgrade to Scrapy 2.5.1 and use the new `http_auth_domain` 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. If you cannot upgrade, set your HTTP authentication credentials on a per-request basis, using for example the `w3lib.http.basic_auth_header` 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`.

Weakness: CWE-522, CWE-200

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-41125?

5 open source packages ship an affected version, including scrapy and Scrapy. It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Scrapy Scrapy.

How do I fix CVE-2021-41125?

Upgrade scrapy to a fixed version for your release line: 1.8.1 or 2.5.1.

Is CVE-2021-41125 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-41125 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2021-41125, GHSA-jwqp-28gf-p498, PYSEC-2021-363, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-41125, openSUSE-SU-2024:11558-1.