GHSA-hxqx-xwvh-44m2 — rack
HIGHGHSA-hxqx-xwvh-44m2 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in rack. A fix is available for rack — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Denial of Service Vulnerability in Rack Multipart Parsing
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-hxqx-xwvh-44m2.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-hxqx-xwvh-44m2 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 379,842 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
rack💎rack💎rackReal-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
There is a possible denial of service vulnerability in the multipart parsing component of Rack. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2022-30122.
Versions Affected: >= 1.2 Not affected: < 1.2 Fixed Versions: 2.0.9.1, 2.1.4.1, 2.2.3.1
Impact
Carefully crafted multipart POST requests can cause Rack's multipart parser to take much longer than expected, leading to a possible denial of service vulnerability.
Impacted code will use Rack's multipart parser to parse multipart posts. This includes directly using the multipart parser like this:
params = Rack::Multipart.parse_multipart(env)
But it also includes reading POST data from a Rack request object like this:
p request.POST # read POST data
p request.params # reads both query params and POST data
All users running an affected release should either upgrade or use one of the workarounds immediately.
Workarounds
There are no feasible workarounds for this issue.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💎RubyGems | rack | ≥ 1.2&&< 2.0.9.1 | 2.0.9.1bundle update rack --conservative |
| 💎RubyGems | rack | ≥ 2.1&&< 2.1.4.1 | 2.1.4.1bundle update rack --conservative |
| 💎RubyGems | rack | ≥ 2.2&&< 2.2.3.1 | 2.2.3.1bundle update rack --conservative |
Affected Products
debian linuxdebianrackrack_projectDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for rack, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update rack to 2.0.9.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-hxqx-xwvh-44m2 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.
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 Gluster Storage 3.5 for RHEL 7 | rubygem-rack-0:2.2.4-1.el7rhgs | RHSA-2023:1486 |
| Red Hat Satellite 6.11 for RHEL 7 | tfm-rubygem-rack-0:2.2.3.1-1.el7sat | RHSA-2022:7242 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-hxqx-xwvh-44m2 in your dependencies?
Find it across RubyGems, including transitive dependencies.