Description

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

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

Mitigation

Aliases

References