GHSA-542m-9234-8gvf vLLM: DoS via unbounded chat_template Jinja2 rendering exhausts the renderer thread pool

• PyPI vllm: >= 0.19.0, < 0.32.0 → fixed in 0.32.0

Summary vLLM renders chat templates by passing the resolved Jinja2 source to `tokenizer.apply_chat_template()`, which compiles and `.render()`s it in an `ImmutableSandboxedEnvironment`. The sandbox prevents code-execution escapes but imposes no wall-clock timeout, no output-size cap, and no nested-loop or binop limit. The render runs in a `ThreadPoolExecutor` whose `max_workers` defaults to 1, and CPython worker threads cannot be interrupted. An authenticated API client (or a malicious model repo loaded with `trust_remote_code=False`) can therefore submit a single short template and permanently wedge all chat-style endpoints (`/v1/chat/completions`, `/v1/responses`, `/tokenize`, `/pooling`-chat, `/invocations`-chat) for every tenant until the process is restarted. A string-multiplication variant instead OOM-kills the API-server process. Because of a separately-reported (GHSA-jmjw-q4x3-hmc2) gate omission on `/v1/responses`, the remote authenticated attacker vector works in default `vllm serve` configuration with no operator opt-in. Impact A single authenticated request of <100 bytes permanently denies all chat-style inference (`/v1/chat/completions`, `/v1/responses`, `/tokenize`, `/pooling`-chat, `/invocations`-chat) to every tenant of the API-server replica until the operator restarts the process. The string-multiplication variant OOM-kills the process. In a multi-tenant deployment this is a cross-tenant denial-of-service from any one tenant. From the malicious-model angle, a model repo whose `tokenizer_config.json` carries the hostile template wedges every replica that loads it on the first legitimate chat request, with `trust_remote_code=False`. Preconditions: any non-harmony model (`model_type != gpt_oss`); `renderer_num_workers` at its default of 1; for the default-config authenticated API attacker vector, `--chat-template` must be unset (the default because most HF models ship their own). Blast radius: API-server process, per replica. Engine/worker processes unaffected by the CPU variant (event loop survives); affected by the memory variant (process OOM). Persistence: until process restart. Survives client disconnect. This advisory was fixed in MR50300.