PYSEC-2026-1851
Denial of service (DoS) via deformation `multipart/form-data` boundary
Details
### 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
Are you affected?
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Affected packages
0 Fixed in: 0.0.18 pip install --upgrade 'python-multipart>=0.0.18' References
- https://github.com/Kludex/python-multipart/security/advisories/GHSA-59g5-xgcq-4qw3 [WEB]
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-53981 [ADVISORY]
- https://github.com/Kludex/python-multipart/commit/c4fe4d3cebc08c660e57dd709af1ffa7059b3177 [WEB]
- https://github.com/Kludex/python-multipart [PACKAGE]
- https://pypi.org/project/python-multipart [PACKAGE]
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-59g5-xgcq-4qw3 [ADVISORY]