What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-34230: Rack: Quadratic complexity in Rack::Utils.select_best_encoding via wildcard Accept-Encoding header
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 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: 2026-04-02 · updated 2026-07-24
- Weakness: CWE-400
Description
Rack is a modular Ruby web server interface. Prior to versions 2.2.23, 3.1.21, and 3.2.6, Rack::Utils.select_best_encoding processes Accept-Encoding values with quadratic time complexity when the header contains many wildcard (*) entries. Because this method is used by Rack::Deflater to choose a response encoding, an unauthenticated attacker can send a single request with a crafted Accept-Encoding header and cause disproportionate CPU consumption on the compression middleware path. This results in a denial of service condition for applications using Rack::Deflater. This issue has been patched in versions 2.2.23, 3.1.21, and 3.2.6.
Affected products
- rack: before 2.2.23; from 3.0.0 before 3.1.21; from 3.2.0 before 3.2.6 — fixed in 2.2.23, 3.1.21, 3.2.6
- Rubygems Rack: before 2.2.23; from 3.0.0.beta1 before 3.1.21; from 3.2.0 before 3.2.6; 0.1.0, 0.2.0, 0.3.0, 0.4.0, 0.9.0, 0.9.1 (+169) — fixed in 2.2.23, 3.1.21, 3.2.6
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: rack 2.2.23, 3.1.21, 3.2.6; Rubygems Rack 2.2.23, 3.1.21, 3.2.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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