GHSA-68xg-gqqm-vgj8 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) CWE-444 vulnerability in puma. A fix is available for puma — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Puma HTTP Request/Response Smuggling vulnerability
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 GHSA-68xg-gqqm-vgj8.
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
GHSA-68xg-gqqm-vgj8 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 378,567 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
Impact
Prior to version 6.3.1, puma exhibited incorrect behavior when parsing chunked transfer encoding bodies and zero-length Content-Length headers in a way that allowed HTTP request smuggling.
The following vulnerabilities are addressed by this advisory:
- Incorrect parsing of trailing fields in chunked transfer encoding bodies
- Parsing of blank/zero-length Content-Length headers
Patches
The vulnerability has been fixed in 6.3.1 and 5.6.7.
Workarounds
No known workarounds.
References
For more information
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:
Open an issue in Puma See our security policy
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 GHSA-68xg-gqqm-vgj8 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 GHSA-68xg-gqqm-vgj8 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-68xg-gqqm-vgj8. 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 GHSA-68xg-gqqm-vgj8 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-68xg-gqqm-vgj8 across RubyGems dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.