Scrapy HTTP authentication credentials potentially leaked to target websites

Impact

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.

Patches

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.

Workarounds

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.

For more information

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