CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-29509

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Published: May 11, 2021 | Modified: Nov 21, 2024
CVSS 3.x
7.5
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS 2.x
5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
7.5 MODERATE
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Ubuntu
MEDIUM

Puma is a concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby/Rack applications. 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. This problem has been fixed in puma 4.3.8 and 5.3.1. 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 and a git patch is available for those using unsupported versions of Puma.

Weakness

The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Puma Puma * 4.3.8 (excluding)
Puma Puma 5.0.0 (including) 5.3.1 (excluding)
Red Hat Satellite 6.10 for RHEL 7 RedHat tfm-rubygem-puma-0:5.3.2-1.el7sat *
Puma Ubuntu groovy *
Puma Ubuntu hirsute *
Puma Ubuntu impish *
Puma Ubuntu trusty *
Puma Ubuntu upstream *
Puma Ubuntu xenial *

Potential Mitigations

  • Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either:

  • The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question.

  • The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute – and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.

References