Raw vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:NCVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.
Summary
CVE-2024-45614 is a medium-severity Authorization Bypass Through User-Controlled Key (CWE-639) vulnerability in Puma Puma. Its CVSS base score is 5.4 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190); ranked at the 48th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to AC-24 (Access Control Decisions) and AC-3 (Access Enforcement) — see the control section below for these in your framework.
OWASP Top 10 for Web (2025)
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2024-2761
Vulnerability Data
Puma is a Ruby/Rack web server built for parallelism. In affected versions clients could clobber values set by intermediate proxies (such as X-Forwarded-For) by providing a underscore version of the same header (X-Forwarded_For). Any users relying on proxy set variables…
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is affected. v6.4.3/v5.6.9 now discards any headers using underscores if the non-underscore version also exists. Effectively, allowing the proxy defined headers to always win. Users are advised to upgrade. Nginx has a underscores_in_headers configuration variable to discard these headers at the proxy level as a mitigation. Any users that are implicitly trusting the proxy defined headers for security should immediately cease doing so until upgraded to the fixed versions.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Control response
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V4.1.3V4.2.4V1.5.3V4.1.1
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Enforcing approved authorizations on every access request structurally stops a user-controlled key from reaching another user's data.
Requiring explicit access-control decisions on each request blocks unauthorized key-driven access.
Least-privilege restrictions limit the scope of data reachable even if a key check is bypassed.
Boundary protection at external interfaces can enforce consistent HTTP request/response parsing rules between intermediaries and endpoints.
Validating HTTP inputs at the intermediary prevents malformed messages from being interpreted inconsistently downstream.
Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI
Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.
Enforcing authorization policy and least privilege directly blocks user-controlled key tampering that bypasses access checks.
Logical access controls prevent unauthorized data access that results from missing authorization checks on object references.
Configuration management can enforce uniform HTTP parsing rules across intermediaries, directly mitigating inconsistent interpretation.
Network monitoring can detect smuggling attempts via anomalous HTTP traffic or logs, while eliminating the inconsistency directly aids detection of such events.
Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI
Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.
Security testing can detect missing authorization checks but does not prevent the weakness in production.
Information access restriction explicitly enforces that users may only retrieve data they are authorized to see, directly addressing user-controlled key bypass.
Access control policy directly requires enforcement of authorization rules that prevent unauthorized access via manipulated keys.
Managing access rights includes ensuring users can only access their own records and not bypass authorization by altering identifiers.
Privileged access rights control restricts what data each user may access, mitigating direct object reference attacks.
Network security controls can enforce consistent HTTP parsing and proxy behavior that mitigates request smuggling.