CVE-2026-24000: Fleet has a rate limiting bypass via untrusted client IP headers

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-05-14 · updated 2026-10-26
Weakness: CWE-290

Description

Fleet is open source device management software. Prior to version 4.80.1, Fleet trusted client-supplied IP address headers when determining the source IP for incoming requests. This allowed authenticated and unauthenticated clients to spoof their apparent IP address and bypass per-IP rate limiting controls. Fleet determines a client’s public IP address using HTTP headers such as X-Forwarded-For, X-Real-IP, and/or True-Client-IP. These headers were trusted without validation. An attacker could supply arbitrary values in these headers, causing Fleet to treat each request as originating from a different IP address. This could allow an attacker to bypass per-IP rate limits and increase the effectiveness of brute-force or password-spraying attempts against authentication endpoints. This issue does not allow authentication bypass, privilege escalation, data exposure, or remote code execution on its own. Version 4.80.1 contains a patch. As a workaround, run Fleet behind a trusted reverse proxy or load balancer that overwrites client IP headers.

Affected products

fleetdm fleet: before 4.80.1 — fixed in 4.80.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: fleetdm fleet 4.80.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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