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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.