CVE-2025-54121 MEDIUM

CVE-2025-54121: Starlette has possible denial-of-service vector when parsing large files in multipart forms

Vendor Encode
Product starlette
Weakness CWE-770 · Uncontrolled resource consumption
Published July 21, 2025
Last update July 22, 2025

CVSS base score

5.3/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required None
User interaction None
Confidentiality None
Integrity None

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

What the vulnerability does

01Description

Starlette is a lightweight ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) framework/toolkit, designed for building async web services in Python. In versions 0.47.1 and below, 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 the application can't accept new connections. The UploadFile code has a minor bug where instead of just checking for self._in_memory, the logic should also check if the additional bytes will cause a rollover. The vulnerability is fixed in version 0.47.2.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

July 21, 2025 CVE published
July 22, 2025 Record updated