CVE-2021-29509

Keepalive Connections Causing Denial Of Service in puma

HIGH
7.5
CVSS Score
Published: May 11, 2021 at 04:50 PM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 03:47 AM UTC
2 products affected across 2 vendorsDebian LinuxPuma

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Severity
HIGH7.5
Exploit prediction
EPSS 2%

Description

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.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

Puma· Pumarubygems
95%
v < 4.3.8v < 5.3.15.0.0 ≤ v < 5.3.1
Affected range stops below 4.3.8, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 5.3.1, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

References (6)

x_refsource_MISCThird Party Advisory
https://github.com/puma/puma/security/policy
Mailing Listx_refsource_MLISTThird Party Advisory
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/08/msg00015.html
x_refsource_MISCProductThird Party Advisory
https://rubygems.org/gems/puma
Vendor Advisoryx_refsource_GENTOOThird Party Advisory
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202208-28

CVSS

7.5HIGHGitHub_M
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
NONE
Availability
HIGH
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-400CWE-667

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