GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI

GHSA-2c2j-9gv5-cj73 Starlette has possible denial-of-service vector when parsing large files in multipart forms

MEDIUM Published 2025-07-21 Modified 2025-07-21 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