GHSA-59g5-xgcq-4qw3
Denial of service (DoS) via deformation `multipart/form-data` boundary
Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| PyPI | python-multipart | < 0.0.18 | 0.0.18 |
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
### Summary
When parsing form data, `python-multipart` skips line breaks (CR `\r` or LF `\n`) in front of the first boundary and any tailing bytes after the last boundary. This happens one byte at a time and emits a log event each time, which may cause excessive logging for certain inputs.
An attacker could abuse this by sending a malicious request with lots of data before the first or after the last boundary, causing high CPU load and stalling the processing thread for a significant amount of time. In case of ASGI application, this could stall the event loop and prevent other requests from being processed, resulting in a denial of service (DoS).
### Impact
Applications that use `python-multipart` to parse form data (or use frameworks that do so) are affected.
### Original Report
This security issue was reported by:
- GitHub security advisory in Starlette on October 30 by @Startr4ck
- Email to `python-multipart` maintainer on October 3 by @mnqazi
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.