Password Pusher rate limiter can be bypassed by forging proxy headersGHSA-ffp2-8p2h-4m5j
MEDIUMGHSA-ffp2-8p2h-4m5j is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) CWE-770 vulnerability in pwpush. A fix is available for pwpush — see the affected versions and patch details below.
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-ffp2-8p2h-4m5j.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
pwpushReal-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
Password Pusher comes with a configurable rate limiter. In versions prior to v1.49.0, the rate limiter could be bypassed by forging proxy headers allowing bad actors to send unlimited traffic to the site potentially causing a denial of service.
Additionally, with the ability to bypass rate limiting, it also allows attackers to more easily execute brute force attacks.
Patches
In v1.49.0, a fix was implemented to only authorize proxies on local IPs which resolves this issue.
If you are running a remote proxy, please see this documentation on how to authorize the IP address of your remote proxy.
Workarounds
It is highly suggested to upgrade to at least v1.49.0 to mitigate this risk.
If for some reason you cannot immediately upgrade, the alternative is that you can add rules to your proxy and/or firewall to not accept external proxy headers such as X-Forwarded-* from clients.
References
The new settings are configurable to authorize remote proxies.
Credits
Thank you to Positive Technologies for reporting and working with me to bring this CVE to the community with the associated fix.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💎RubyGems | pwpush | all versions | 1.49.0bundle update pwpush --conservative |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for pwpush, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update pwpush to 1.49.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-ffp2-8p2h-4m5j is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-ffp2-8p2h-4m5j in your dependencies?
Find it across RubyGems, including transitive dependencies.