Fleet has a rate limiting bypass via untrusted client IP headers

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.

Source published

14 May 2026 18:56:39 UTC

Source modified

14 May 2026 19:41:20 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

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CVSS 4.0 · 6.9 CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N