GHSA-f96h-pmfr-66vw

Starlette Denial of service (DoS) via multipart/form-data

At a glance

Published
Updated
CVE
CVE-2024-47874
Aliases
PYSEC-2026-1943
CVSS_V3
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:N
CVSS_V4
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Description

### Summary Starlette treats `multipart/form-data` parts without a `filename` as text form fields and buffers those in byte strings with no size limit. This allows an attacker to upload arbitrary large form fields and cause Starlette to both slow down significantly due to excessive memory allocations and copy operations, and also consume more and more memory until the server starts swapping and grinds to a halt, or the OS terminates the server process with an OOM error. Uploading multiple such requests in parallel may be enough to render a service practically unusable, even if reasonable request size limits are enforced by a reverse proxy in front of Starlette. ### PoC ```python from starlette.applications import Starlette from starlette.routing import Route async def poc(request): async with request.form(): pass app = Starlette(routes=[ Route('/', poc, methods=["POST"]), ]) ``` ```sh curl http://localhost:8000 -F 'big=</dev/urandom' ``` ### Impact This Denial of service (DoS) vulnerability affects all applications built with Starlette (or FastAPI) accepting form requests.

Affected packages

PackageVersions
PyPI · starletteintroduced 0, fixed 0.40.0

References

Sources

SourceLicence
OSV.devCC-BY 4.0 — GitHub Advisory Database