CVE-2021-29509

HIGH7.5EPSS 1.4%

Puma's Keepalive Connections Causing Denial Of Service

Published: 5/18/2021Modified: 3/13/2026
Also known as:GHSA-q28m-8xjw-8vr5

Description

This vulnerability is related to [CVE-2019-16770](https://github.com/puma/puma/security/advisories/GHSA-7xx3-m584-x994). ### 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security))). The fix is very small. [A git patch is available here](https://gist.github.com/nateberkopec/4b3ea5676c0d70cbb37c82d54be25837) for those using [unsupported versions](https://github.com/puma/puma/security/policy#supported-versions) of Puma. ### For more information If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: * Open an issue in [Puma](https://github.com/puma/puma). * To report problems with this fix or to report another vulnerability, see [our security policy.](https://github.com/puma/puma/security/policy) ### 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.

Affected packages (3)

CVSS scores

SourceVersionSeverityVector
osvCVSS 3.1HIGH7.5CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References (10)