GHSA-2vqw-3mp8-cgmx — Puma PROXY Protocol v1 Accepts Repeated Protocol Headers on Persistent Connections

Affected: RubyGems: puma

### Impact

Puma is vulnerable to source IP spoofing when `set_remote_address proxy_protocol: :v1` is enabled and persistent connections are used.

PROXY protocol v1 is a connection-level protocol. [Support was added to Puma in v5.5.0](https://github.com/puma/puma/issues/2651). A proxy sends one PROXY header at the beginning of a TCP connection, before any HTTP data. Puma incorrectly re-parsed PROXY protocol headers after each keep-alive request on the same connection. An attacker able to send HTTP requests through a trusted proxy could therefore inject a second PROXY header between HTTP requests. Puma would treat the injected header as authoritative for the next request and overwrite `REMOTE_ADDR`.

This can mislead applications or middleware that use `REMOTE_ADDR` for security decisions, rate limiting, auditing, or allow/deny lists.

**Only deployments that explicitly enable PROXY protocol v1 are affected**, and will have set:

```ruby set_remote_address proxy_protocol: :v1 ```

Puma's default configuration is not affected. Deployments that do not use persistent connections to Puma are also not expected to be affected by this issue.

### Patches

Users should upgrade to versions 7.2.1 or 8.0.2.

### Workarounds

Disable PROXY protocol v1 parsing if it is not required:

```ruby # remove/comment this: # set_remote_address proxy_protocol: :v1 ```

Users can also disable persistent connections to Puma, for example:

```ruby enable_keep_alives false ```

### References…

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GHSA-2vqw-3mp8-cgmx — Puma PROXY Protocol v1 Accepts Repeated Protocol Headers on Persistent Connections