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GHSA-q28m-8xjw-8vr5

HighCVSS 7.5 / 10
Published May 18, 2021·Last modified Mar 13, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

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:

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.

Risk Scores
Base Score
7.5

The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the availability of the system.

Threat Intelligence
6.9

Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.

EPSS
1.60%

The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

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