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 underscores_in_headers 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.

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