CVE-2023-40175 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.3) CWE-444 vulnerability in puma. A fix is available for puma — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests in puma
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2023-40175.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-40175 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,636 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
puma💎pumaReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects RubyGems packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Puma is a Ruby/Rack web server built for parallelism. Prior to versions 6.3.1 and 5.6.7, puma exhibited incorrect behavior when parsing chunked transfer encoding bodies and zero-length Content-Length headers in a way that allowed HTTP request smuggling. Severity of this issue is highly dependent on the nature of the web site using puma is. This could be caused by either incorrect parsing of trailing fields in chunked transfer encoding bodies or by parsing of blank/zero-length Content-Length headers. Both issues have been addressed and this vulnerability has been fixed in versions 6.3.1 and 5.6.7. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💎RubyGems | puma | all versions | 5.6.7bundle update puma --conservative |
| 💎RubyGems | puma | ≥ 6.0.0&&< 6.3.1 | 6.3.1bundle update puma --conservative |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for puma, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update puma to 5.6.7 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-40175 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2023-40175 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2023-40175. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Satellite 6.14 for RHEL 8 | rubygem-puma-0:6.3.1-1.el8sat | RHSA-2024:0797 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-40175 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2023-40175 across RubyGems dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.