Ruby/puma/0.9.0

HTTP Response Splitting (Early Hints) in Puma

Impact

If an application using Puma allows untrusted input in an early-hints header, an attacker can use a carriage return character to end the header and inject malicious content, such as additional headers or an entirely new response body. This vulnerability is known as HTTP Response Splitting.

While not an attack in itself, response splitting is a vector for several other attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS).

This is related to CVE-2020-5247, which fixed this vulnerability but only for regular responses.

Patches

This has been fixed in 4.3.3 and 3.12.4.

Workarounds

Users can not allow untrusted/user input in the Early Hints response header.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: * Open an issue in puma * Email us a project maintainer. Email addresses are listed in our Code of Conduct.

Puma with proxy which forwards LF characters as line endings could allow HTTP request smuggling

Impact

Prior to puma version 5.5.0, using puma with a proxy which forwards LF characters as line endings could allow HTTP request smuggling. A client could smuggle a request through a proxy, causing the proxy to send a response back to another unknown client.

This behavior (forwarding LF characters as line endings) is very uncommon amongst proxy servers, so we have graded the impact here as low. Puma is only aware of a single proxy server which has this behavior.

If the proxy uses persistent connections and the client adds another request in via HTTP pipelining, the proxy may mistake it as the first request's body. Puma, however, would see it as two requests, and when processing the second request, send back a response that the proxy does not expect. If the proxy has reused the persistent connection to Puma to send another request for a different client, the second response from the first client will be sent to the second client.

Patches

This vulnerability was patched in Puma 5.5.1 and 4.3.9.

Workarounds

This vulnerability only affects Puma installations without any proxy in front.

Use a proxy which does not forward LF characters as line endings.

Proxies which do not forward LF characters as line endings:

• Nginx
• Apache (>2.4.25)
• Haproxy
• Caddy
• Traefik

Possible Breakage

If you are dealing with legacy clients that want to send LF as a line ending in an HTTP header, this will cause those clients to receive a 400 error.

References

• HTTP Request Smuggling

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in Puma
• See our security policy

A poorly-behaved client could use keepalive requests to monopolize Puma's reactor and create a denial of service attack

Keepalive thread overload/DoS

Impact

A poorly-behaved client could use keepalive requests to monopolize Puma's reactor and create a denial of service attack.

If more keepalive connections to Puma are opened than there are threads available, additional connections will wait permanently if the attacker sends requests frequently enough.

Patches

This vulnerability is patched in Puma 4.3.1 and 3.12.2.

Workarounds

Reverse proxies in front of Puma could be configured to always allow less than X keepalive connections to a Puma cluster or process, where X is the number of threads configured in Puma's thread pool.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue at puma.

HTTP Response Splitting in Puma

In Puma (RubyGem) before 4.3.2 and 3.12.3, if an application using Puma allows untrusted input in a response header, an attacker can use newline characters (i.e. CR, LF or/r, /n) to end the header and inject malicious content, such as additional headers or an entirely new response body. This vulnerability is known as HTTP Response Splitting.

While not an attack in itself, response splitting is a vector for several other attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS).

This is related to CVE-2019-16254, which fixed this vulnerability for the WEBrick Ruby web server.

This has been fixed in versions 4.3.2 and 3.12.3 by checking all headers for line endings and rejecting headers with those characters.

Puma's header normalization allows for client to clobber proxy set headers

Impact

Clients could clobber values set by intermediate proxies (such as X-Forwarded-For) by providing a underscore version of the same header (X-Forwarded_For). Any users trusting headers set by their proxy may be affected. Attackers may be able to downgrade connections to HTTP (non-SSL) or redirect responses, which could cause confidentiality leaks if combined with a separate MITM attack.

Patches

v6.4.3/v5.6.9 now discards any headers using underscores if the non-underscore version also exists. Effectively, allowing the proxy defined headers to always win.

Workarounds

Nginx has a underscoresinheaders configuration variable to discard these headers at the proxy level.

Any users that are implicitly trusting the proxy defined headers for security or availability should immediately cease doing so until upgraded to the fixed versions.

Puma HTTP Request/Response Smuggling vulnerability

Impact

Prior to versions 6.4.2 and 5.6.8, puma exhibited dangerous behavior when parsing chunked transfer encoding bodies.

Fixed versions limit the size of chunk extensions. Without this limit, an attacker could cause unbounded resource (CPU, network bandwidth) consumption.

Patches

The vulnerability has been fixed in 6.4.2 and 5.6.8.

Workarounds

No known workarounds.

References

• HTTP Request Smuggling
• Open an issue in Puma
• See our security policy

Puma vulnerable to HTTP Request Smuggling

When using Puma behind a proxy that does not properly validate that the incoming HTTP request matches the RFC7230 standard, Puma and the frontend proxy may disagree on where a request starts and ends. This would allow requests to be smuggled via the front-end proxy to Puma.

The following vulnerabilities are addressed by this advisory: - Lenient parsing of Transfer-Encoding headers, when unsupported encodings should be rejected and the final encoding must be chunked. - Lenient parsing of malformed Content-Length headers and chunk sizes, when only digits and hex digits should be allowed. - Lenient parsing of duplicate Content-Length headers, when they should be rejected. - Lenient parsing of the ending of chunked segments, when they should end with \r\n.

The vulnerability has been fixed in 5.6.4 and 4.3.12. When deploying a proxy in front of Puma, turning on any and all functionality to make sure that the request matches the RFC7230 standard.

These proxy servers are known to have good behavior re: this standard and upgrading Puma may not be necessary. Users are encouraged to validate for themselves.

• Nginx (latest)
• Apache (latest)
• Haproxy 2.5+
• Caddy (latest)
• Traefik (latest)

Puma's Keepalive Connections Causing Denial Of Service

This vulnerability is related to CVE-2019-16770.

Impact

The fix for CVE-2019-16770 was incomplete. The original fix only protected existing connections that had already been accepted from having their requests starved by greedy persistent-connections saturating all threads in the same process. However, new connections may still be starved by greedy persistent-connections saturating all threads in all processes in the cluster.

A puma server which received more concurrent keep-alive connections than the server had threads in its threadpool would service only a subset of connections, denying service to the unserved connections.

Patches

This problem has been fixed in puma 4.3.8 and 5.3.1.

Workarounds

Setting queue_requests false also fixes the issue. This is not advised when using puma without a reverse proxy, such as nginx or apache, because you will open yourself to slow client attacks (e.g. slowloris).

The fix is very small. A git patch is available here for those using unsupported versions of Puma.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in Puma.
• To report problems with this fix or to report another vulnerability, see our security policy.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to @MSP-Greg, @wjordan and @evanphx for their review on this issue.

Thank you to @ioquatix for providing a modified fork of wrk which made debugging this issue much easier.

Puma used with Rails may lead to Information Exposure

Impact

Prior to puma version 5.6.2, puma may not always call close on the response body. Rails, prior to version 7.0.2.2, depended on the response body being closed in order for its CurrentAttributes implementation to work correctly.

From Rails:

Under certain circumstances response bodies will not be closed, for example a bug in a webserver[1] or a bug in a Rack middleware. In the event a response is not notified of a close, ActionDispatch::Executor will not know to reset thread local state for the next request. This can lead to data being leaked to subsequent requests, especially when interacting with ActiveSupport::CurrentAttributes.

The combination of these two behaviors (Puma not closing the body + Rails' Executor implementation) causes information leakage.

Patches

This problem is fixed in Puma versions 5.6.2 and 4.3.11.

This problem is fixed in Rails versions 7.02.2, 6.1.4.6, 6.0.4.6, and 5.2.6.2.

See: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-wh98-p28r-vrc9 for details about the rails vulnerability

Upgrading to a patched Rails or Puma version fixes the vulnerability.

Workarounds

Upgrade to Rails versions 7.02.2, 6.1.4.6, 6.0.4.6, and 5.2.6.2.

The Rails CVE includes a middleware that can be used instead.

References

• Rails CVE: CVE-2022-23633

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: * Open an issue in puma * See our security policy

HTTP Smuggling via Transfer-Encoding Header in Puma

Impact

This is a similar but different vulnerability to the one patched in 3.12.5 and 4.3.4.

A client could smuggle a request through a proxy, causing the proxy to send a response back to another unknown client.

If the proxy uses persistent connections and the client adds another request in via HTTP pipelining, the proxy may mistake it as the first request's body. Puma, however, would see it as two requests, and when processing the second request, send back a response that the proxy does not expect. If the proxy has reused the persistent connection to Puma to send another request for a different client, the second response from the first client will be sent to the second client.

Patches

The problem has been fixed in Puma 3.12.6 and Puma 4.3.5.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in Puma
• See our security policy

HTTP Smuggling via Transfer-Encoding Header in Puma

Impact

By using an invalid transfer-encoding header, an attacker could smuggle an HTTP response.

Originally reported by @ZeddYu, who has our thanks for the detailed report.

Patches

The problem has been fixed in Puma 3.12.5 and Puma 4.3.4.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in Puma
• See our security policy

Keepalive thread overload/DoS in puma

A poorly-behaved client could use keepalive requests to monopolize Puma's reactor and create a denial of service attack.

If more keepalive connections to Puma are opened than there are threads available, additional connections will wait permanently if the attacker sends requests frequently enough.

HTTP Smuggling via Transfer-Encoding Header in Puma

Impact

By using an invalid transfer-encoding header, an attacker could smuggle an HTTP response.

Patches

The problem has been fixed in Puma 3.12.5 and Puma 4.3.4.

HTTP Smuggling via Transfer-Encoding Header in Puma

Impact

This is a similar but different vulnerability to the one patched in 3.12.5 and 4.3.4.

A client could smuggle a request through a proxy, causing the proxy to send a response back to another unknown client.

If the proxy uses persistent connections and the client adds another request in via HTTP pipelining, the proxy may mistake it as the first request's body. Puma, however, would see it as two requests, and when processing the second request, send back a response that the proxy does not expect. If the proxy has reused the persistent connection to Puma to send another request for a different client, the second response from the first client will be sent to the second client.

Patches

The problem has been fixed in Puma 3.12.6 and Puma 4.3.5.

HTTP Response Splitting vulnerability in puma

If an application using Puma allows untrusted input in a response header, an attacker can use newline characters (i.e. CR, LF) to end the header and inject malicious content, such as additional headers or an entirely new response body. This vulnerability is known as HTTP Response Splitting.

While not an attack in itself, response splitting is a vector for several other attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS).

HTTP Response Splitting (Early Hints) in Puma

Impact

If an application using Puma allows untrusted input in an early-hints header, an attacker can use a carriage return character to end the header and inject malicious content, such as additional headers or an entirely new response body. This vulnerability is known as HTTP Response Splitting

While not an attack in itself, response splitting is a vector for several other attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS).

This is related to CVE-2020-5247, which fixed this vulnerability but only for regular responses.

Patches

This has been fixed in 4.3.3 and 3.12.4.

Workarounds

Users can not allow untrusted/user input in the Early Hints response header.

Keepalive Connections Causing Denial Of Service in puma

Impact

The fix for CVE-2019-16770 was incomplete. The original fix only protected existing connections that had already been accepted from having their requests starved by greedy persistent-connections saturating all threads in the same process. However, new connections may still be starved by greedy persistent-connections saturating all threads in all processes in the cluster.

A puma server which received more concurrent keep-alive connections than the server had threads in its threadpool would service only a subset of connections, denying service to the unserved connections.

Patches

This problem has been fixed in puma 4.3.8 and 5.3.1.

Workarounds

Setting queue_requests false also fixes the issue. This is not advised when using puma without a reverse proxy, such as nginx or apache, because you will open yourself to slow client attacks (e.g. slowloris).

The fix is very small. A git patch is available here for those using unsupported versions of Puma.

Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests ('HTTP Request Smuggling') in puma

Impact

Prior to puma version 5.5.0, using puma with a proxy which forwards LF characters as line endings could allow HTTP request smuggling. A client could smuggle a request through a proxy, causing the proxy to send a response back to another unknown client.

This behavior (forwarding LF characters as line endings) is very uncommon amongst proxy servers, so we have graded the impact here as low. Puma is only aware of a single proxy server which has this behavior.

If the proxy uses persistent connections and the client adds another request in via HTTP pipelining, the proxy may mistake it as the first request's body. Puma, however, would see it as two requests, and when processing the second request, send back a response that the proxy does not expect. If the proxy has reused the persistent connection to Puma to send another request for a different client, the second response from the first client will be sent to the second client.

Patches

This vulnerability was patched in Puma 5.5.1 and 4.3.9.

Workarounds

This vulnerability only affects Puma installations without any proxy in front.

Use a proxy which does not forward LF characters as line endings.

Proxies which do not forward LF characters as line endings:

• Nginx
• Apache (>2.4.25)
• Haproxy
• Caddy
• Traefik

Possible Breakage

If you are dealing with legacy clients that want to send LF as a line ending in an HTTP header, this will cause those clients to receive a 400 error.

References

• HTTP Request Smuggling

Information Exposure with Puma when used with Rails

Impact

Prior to puma version 5.6.2, puma may not always call close on the response body. Rails, prior to version 7.0.2.2, depended on the response body being closed in order for its CurrentAttributes implementation to work correctly.

From Rails:

Under certain circumstances response bodies will not be closed, for example a bug in a webserver[1] or a bug in a Rack middleware. In the event a response is not notified of a close, ActionDispatch::Executor will not know to reset thread local state for the next request. This can lead to data being leaked to subsequent requests, especially when interacting with ActiveSupport::CurrentAttributes.

The combination of these two behaviors (Puma not closing the body + Rails' Executor implementation) causes information leakage.

Patches

This problem is fixed in Puma versions 5.6.2 and 4.3.11.

This problem is fixed in Rails versions 7.02.2, 6.1.4.6, 6.0.4.6, and 5.2.6.2.

See: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-wh98-p28r-vrc9 for details about the rails vulnerability

Upgrading to a patched Rails or Puma version fixes the vulnerability.

Workarounds

Upgrade to Rails versions 7.0.2.2, 6.1.4.6, 6.0.4.6, and 5.2.6.2.

The Rails CVE includes a middleware that can be used instead.

HTTP Request Smuggling in puma

Impact

When using Puma behind a proxy that does not properly validate that the incoming HTTP request matches the RFC7230 standard, Puma and the frontend proxy may disagree on where a request starts and ends. This would allow requests to be smuggled via the front-end proxy to Puma.

The following vulnerabilities are addressed by this advisory: - Lenient parsing of Transfer-Encoding headers, when unsupported encodings should be rejected and the final encoding must be chunked. - Lenient parsing of malformed Content-Length headers and chunk sizes, when only digits and hex digits should be allowed. - Lenient parsing of duplicate Content-Length headers, when they should be rejected. - Lenient parsing of the ending of chunked segments, when they should end with \r\n.

Patches

The vulnerability has been fixed in 5.6.4 and 4.3.12.

Workarounds

When deploying a proxy in front of Puma, turning on any and all functionality to make sure that the request matches the RFC7230 standard.

These proxy servers are known to have good behavior re: this standard and upgrading Puma may not be necessary. Users are encouraged to validate for themselves.

• Nginx (latest)
• Apache (latest)
• Haproxy 2.5+
• Caddy (latest)
• Traefik (latest)

References

HTTP Request Smuggling

Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests ('HTTP Request/Response Smuggling') in puma

Impact

Prior to version 6.3.1, puma exhibited incorrect behavior when parsing chunked transfer encoding bodies and zero-length Content-Length headers in a way that allowed HTTP request smuggling.

The following vulnerabilities are addressed by this advisory: - Incorrect parsing of trailing fields in chunked transfer encoding bodies - Parsing of blank/zero-length Content-Length headers\r\n

Patches

The vulnerability has been fixed in 6.3.1 and 5.6.7.

Workarounds

No known workarounds.

References

HTTP Request Smuggling

Puma HTTP Request/Response Smuggling vulnerability

Impact

Prior to versions 6.4.2 and 5.6.8, puma exhibited incorrect behavior when parsing chunked transfer encoding bodies in a way that allowed HTTP request smuggling.

Fixed versions limit the size of chunk extensions. Without this limit, an attacker could cause unbounded resource (CPU, network bandwidth) consumption.

Patches

The vulnerability has been fixed in 6.4.2 and 5.6.8.

Workarounds

No known workarounds.

References

• HTTP Request Smuggling
• Open an issue in Puma
• See our security policy

Puma's header normalization allows for client to clobber proxy set headers

Impact

Clients could clobber values set by intermediate proxies (such as X-Forwarded-For) by providing a underscore version of the same header (X-Forwarded_For).

Any users trusting headers set by their proxy may be affected. Attackers may be able to downgrade connections to HTTP (non-SSL) or redirect responses, which could cause confidentiality leaks if combined with a separate MITM attack.

Patches

v6.4.3/v5.6.9 now discards any headers using underscores if the non-underscore version also exists. Effectively, allowing the proxy defined headers to always win.

Workarounds

Nginx has a underscoresinheaders configuration variable to discard these headers at the proxy level.

Any users that are implicitly trusting the proxy defined headers for security or availability should immediately cease doing so until upgraded to the fixed versions.

Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests ('HTTP Request/Response Smuggling') in puma

Impact

Prior to version 6.3.1, puma exhibited incorrect behavior when parsing chunked transfer encoding bodies and zero-length Content-Length headers in a way that allowed HTTP request smuggling.

The following vulnerabilities are addressed by this advisory: - Incorrect parsing of trailing fields in chunked transfer encoding bodies - Parsing of blank/zero-length Content-Length headers\r\n

Patches

The vulnerability has been fixed in 6.3.1 and 5.6.7.

Workarounds

No known workarounds.

References

HTTP Request Smuggling