CVE-2026-46356

Fleet: IP spoofing allows bypassing API rate limiting

Published

2026-05-14

Modified

2026-09-06

EPSS percentile

20%

Aliases

GHSA-mxmp-wr3w-rvqx

Sources

github-advisory

Summary

### Summary A vulnerability in Fleet's IP extraction logic allows unauthenticated attackers to bypass API rate limiting by spoofing client IP headers. This may allow brute-force login attempts or other abuse against Fleet instances exposed to the public internet. ### Impact Fleet extracted client IP addresses from request headers (`True-Client-IP`, `X-Real-IP`, `X-Forwarded-For`) without validating that those headers originate from a trusted proxy. The extracted IP is used as the key for rate limiting and IP ban decisions. As a result, an attacker could rotate the value of these headers on each request, causing Fleet to treat each attempt as coming from a different client. This effectively bypasses per-IP rate limits on sensitive endpoints such as the login API, enabling unrestricted brute-force or credential stuffing attacks. This issue primarily affects Fleet instances that are directly exposed to the internet without a reverse proxy that overwrites forwarded-IP headers. Instances behind a properly configured proxy or WAF are less affected. ### Workarounds If an immediate upgrade is not possible, administrators should ensure Fleet is deployed behind a reverse proxy (e.g., nginx, Cloudflare, AWS ALB) that overwrites `X-Forwarded-For` with the true client IP, and apply rate limiting at the proxy or WAF layer. ### For more information If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: Email us at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Join #fleet in [osquery Slack](https://join.slack.com/t/osquery/shared_invite/zt-h29zm0gk-s2DBtGUTW4CFel0f0IjTEw) ### Credits We thank @fuzzztf for responsibly reporting this issue.

Affected packages

Remediation: Upgrade to 4.80.1 or later.

References

• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-mxmp-wr3w-rvqx