CVE-2021-29509
Publication date 11 May 2021
Last updated 25 August 2025
Ubuntu priority
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.
Status
| Package | Ubuntu Release | Status |
|---|---|---|
| puma | ||
| 22.04 LTS jammy |
Not affected
|
|
| 20.04 LTS focal |
Not affected
|
|
| 18.04 LTS bionic | Not in release | |
| 16.04 LTS xenial | Ignored end of standard support | |
| 14.04 LTS trusty | Not in release |
Severity score breakdown
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Base score |
7.5 · High
|
| Attack vector | Network |
| Attack complexity | Low |
| Privileges required | None |
| User interaction | None |
| Scope | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | None |
| Integrity impact | None |
| Availability impact | High |
| Vector | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H |