Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting puma package, versions >=5.0.0.beta1, <5.3.1 <4.3.8


0.0
high

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low
    Availability High

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 1.02% (84th percentile)
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NVD
7.5 high
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SUSE
7.5 high
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Red Hat
7.5 high

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-RUBY-PUMA-1291014
  • published 12 May 2021
  • disclosed 12 May 2021
  • credit Will Jordan, Samuel Williams, MSP-Greg

How to fix?

Upgrade puma to version 5.3.1, 4.3.8 or higher.

Overview

puma is a simple, fast, threaded, and highly concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby/Rack applications. Puma is intended for use in both development and production environments. It's great for highly concurrent Ruby implementations such as Rubinius and JRuby as well as as providing process worker support to support CRuby well.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). This is due to an incomplete fix for CVE-2019-16770.

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 receives more concurrent keep-alive connections than the server had threads in its threadpool will service only a subset of connections, denying service to the unserved connections.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

References