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High resource usage when parsing multipart/form-data containing a large part with CR/LF character at the beginning

Moderate
pgjones published GHSA-hrfv-mqp8-q5rw Oct 24, 2023

Package

pip werkzeug (pip)

Affected versions

<= 2.3.7
>= 3.0.0, < 3.0.1

Patched versions

2.3.8
3.0.1

Description

Werkzeug multipart data parser needs to find a boundary that may be between consecutive chunks. That's why parsing is based on looking for newline characters. Unfortunately, code looking for partial boundary in the buffer is written inefficiently, so if we upload a file that starts with CR or LF and then is followed by megabytes of data without these characters: all of these bytes are appended chunk by chunk into internal bytearray and lookup for boundary is performed on growing buffer.

This allows an attacker to cause a denial of service by sending crafted multipart data to an endpoint that will parse it. The amount of CPU time required can block worker processes from handling legitimate requests. The amount of RAM required can trigger an out of memory kill of the process. If many concurrent requests are sent continuously, this can exhaust or kill all available workers.

Severity

Moderate
5.7
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

Attack vector
Adjacent
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVE ID

CVE-2023-46136

Weaknesses

Credits