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CVE-2026-54738

Lemmy: Rate limit bypass via X-Forwarded-For header spoofing in actix-web ConnectionInfo

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 0.19.19, 1.0.0-beta.1
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: none
  • Automatable: yes
  • Technical impact: partial

Summary

Lemmy is a link aggregator and forum for the fediverse. Prior to 0.19.19 and 1.0.0-beta.1, actix-web ConnectionInfo::realip_remote_addr reads the first value of X-Forwarded-For as the client address used by raw_ip_key in crates/utils/src/rate_limit/mod.rs. Lemmy's bundled docker/nginx.conf uses $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for instead of $remote_addr, which appends the real client address to an X-Forwarded-For value supplied by the client. An unauthenticated attacker can therefore place a different spoofed address first on each request and receive a new rate-limit bucket, bypassing limits on POST /api/v4/account/auth/register, POST /api/v4/account/auth/login, POST /api/v4/post, POST /api/v4/comment, GET /api/v4/search, POST /api/v4/image, and POST /api/v4/account/import_settings. This permits excessive account creation, brute-force attempts, spam, scraping, uploads, and repeated imports. This issue is fixed in versions 0.19.19 and 1.0.0-beta.1.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • LemmyNet lemmy

    fixed in 0.19.19; From 1.0.0-alpha.5 · fixed in 1.0.0-beta.1

References 8

GitHub · LemmyNet/lemmy

join-lemmy.org