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PYSEC-2026-1943
No affected components available
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
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"]),
])
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.
The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists.
No exploitation activity has been observed at this time. Continue routine monitoring.
The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
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