GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI
GHSA-2c2j-9gv5-cj73 Starlette has possible denial-of-service vector when parsing large files in multipart forms
MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2025-54121
- Ecosystem
- PyPI
- Packages
- starlette
- Severity
- Moderate
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
- Weaknesses
- CWE-770
- Reviewed
- 2025-07-21
Affected packages
• PyPI starlette: < 0.47.2 → fixed in 0.47.2
Description
Summary
When parsing a multi-part form with large files (greater than the default max spool size) `starlette` will block the main thread to roll the file over to disk. This blocks the event thread which means we can't accept new connections.
Details
Please see this discussion for details: https://github.com/encode/starlette/discussions/2927#discussioncomment-13721403. In summary the following UploadFile code (copied from here) has a minor bug. Instead of just checking for `self._in_memory` we should also check if the additional bytes will cause a rollover.
```python
@property
def _in_memory(self) -> bool:
# check for SpooledTemporaryFile._rolled
rolled_to_disk = getattr(self.file, "_rolled", True)
return not rolled_to_disk
async def write(self, data: bytes) -> None:
if self.size is not None:
self.size += len(data)
if self._in_memory:
self.file.write(data)
else:
await run_in_threadpool(self.file.write, data)
```
I have already created a PR which fixes the problem: https://github.com/encode/starlette/pull/2962
PoC
See the discussion here for steps on how to reproduce.
Impact
To be honest, very low and not many users will be impacted. Parsing large forms is already CPU intensive so the additional IO block doesn't slow down `starlette` that much on systems with modern HDDs/SSDs. If someone is running on tape they might see a greater impact.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2025-54121 Starlette is a lightweight ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) framework/toolkit, designed for building async web services in… vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness
References
- https://github.com/encode/starlette/security/advisories/GHSA-2c2j-9gv5-cj73 web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-54121 advisory
- https://github.com/encode/starlette/commit/9f7ec2eb512fcc3fe90b43cb9dd9e1d08696bec1 web
- https://github.com/encode/starlette package
- https://github.com/encode/starlette/blob/fa5355442753f794965ae1af0f87f9fec1b9a3de/starlette/datastructures.py#L436C5-L447C14 web
- https://github.com/encode/starlette/discussions/2927#discussioncomment-13721403 web