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PYSEC-2026-3039
No affected components available
Summary
python-multipart has a denial of service vulnerability in multipart part header parsing. When parsing multipart/form-data, MultipartParser previously had no limit on the number of part headers or the size of an individual part header. An attacker could send a request with either many repeated headers without terminating the header block or a single very large header value, causing excessive CPU work before request rejection or completion.
Impact
Applications that parse attacker-controlled multipart/form-data with affected versions of python-multipart can experience CPU exhaustion. ASGI applications using Starlette, FastAPI, or other frameworks that invoke python-multipart may have worker or event-loop delays while processing malicious upload requests.
Details
The affected parser states are HEADER_FIELD_START, HEADER_FIELD, HEADER_VALUE_START, HEADER_VALUE, and HEADER_VALUE_ALMOST_DONE. The issue can be triggered by:
- A multipart part with an oversized individual header value.
- A multipart part with many repeated header lines or an unterminated header block.
Both variants are addressed by enforcing default parser limits for maximum header count and maximum header size.
Mitigation
Upgrade to python-multipart 0.0.27 or later.
If upgrading is not immediately possible, reduce exposure by enforcing request body size limits at the server, proxy, or framework layer. This is only a mitigation; affected versions of python-multipart still parse multipart part headers without the default header count and header size limits.
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. There is a high impact on the availability of the system.
Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.
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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