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MEDIUM

CVE-2025-54121

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

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.

Published Updated Sources: cvelistV5, GitHub_M

Triage

Is it exploited, how likely is exploitation, what does it touch, and how severe do the scoring sources call it.

Exploitation

Unreported

no source claims exploitation

EPSS

1%

chance of exploitation in 30 days

Affects

encode

starlette

CVSS base

5.3

MEDIUM

CISA SSVC assessment

Three decision points CISA publishes for the CVEs it assesses · SSVC 2.0.3. A stakeholder decision, not a severity score.

CISA

Exploitation

PoC

none · proof-of-concept · active

Automatable

No

can an attacker script all four kill-chain steps

Technical impact

Partial

partial · total control of the vulnerable component

Affected scope

The catalog records vendors and products as separate lists, not pairs, so which product belongs to which vendor is not something this page can say.

Vendors (1)

encode

Products (1)

starlette

Every base score collected

Sources score independently and disagree; each row says who scored it and under which version.

ScoreVersionSeverityExpl.ImpactSource
5.3CVSS 3.1MEDIUM——cvelistV5

Weakness & attack patterns

  • CWE-770

Attack patterns reported against this CVE. The ATT&CK techniques below are inferred from its weakness class.

  • T1498.001Network Denial of Service: Direct Network Flood
  • T1499Endpoint Denial of Service
  • T1499.003Endpoint Denial of Service: Application Exhaustion Flood

Detection

Read off the CVSS vector and the weakness class. Starting points, not rules we have tested.

  • Search application, proxy, and WAF logs for requests touching /toolkit.

References

4 on the record

Elsewhere on this site

  • encodeevery CVE for this vendor
  • CWE-770other pages naming this weakness

Not in any source we poll

Listed rather than left blank: an empty field and an unmeasured one look identical on screen, and only one is a reason to look elsewhere.

  • No confirmed IOCs, IP addresses, domains, file hashes, or malware artifacts supplied.
  • No organization-specific asset inventory, compensating-control status, or patch deployment evidence supplied.
  • No exploit packet captures, log samples, or incident case IDs supplied.