CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2019-12520 — An issue was discovered in Squid through 4.7 and 5
An issue was discovered in Squid through 4.7 and 5. When receiving a request, Squid checks its cache to see if it can serve up a response. It does this by making a MD5 hash of the absolute URL of the request. If found, it servers the request. The absolute URL can include the decoded UserInfo (username and password) for certain protocols. This decoded info is prepended to the domain. This allows an attacker to provide a username that has special characters to delimit the domain, and treat the rest of the URL as a path or query string. An attacker could first make a request to their domain using an encoded username, then when a request for the target domain comes in that decodes to the exact URL, it will serve the attacker's HTML instead of the real HTML. On Squid servers that also act as reverse proxies, this allows an attacker to gain access to features that only reverse proxies can use, such as ESI.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2020-04-15
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-20
Affected products
- squid-cache / squid
- canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04
- canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04
- debian / debian_linux / 9.0
- debian / debian_linux / 10.0
Matched remediation archetype
General vulnerability remediation
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Confirm the affected component, deployment paths, reachable interfaces, and enabled features from inventories and configuration, without probing production destructively.
- Compare the advisory's affected conditions with the repository lockfiles, build manifests, artifacts, and runtime inventory.
- Identify data sensitivity, trust boundaries, and privilege level for every confirmed affected deployment.
Remediate safely
- Apply a vendor-supported fix or remove the affected component or feature; record the selected change and its source in the repository.
- Update direct and transitive dependency locks, generated artifacts, deployment manifests, and asset inventories together.
- Add a regression test for the documented unsafe condition using inert inputs and preserve rollback instructions.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.