GHSA-p543-xpfm-54cp

    Dashboard / Vulnerabilities / GHSA-p543-xpfm-54cp

    GHSA-p543-xpfm-54cp

    Published: 7 Oct 2025Last Modified: 10 Sept 2026

    Summary: Rack's unbounded multipart preamble buffering enables DoS (memory exhaustion)

    Details: ## Summary `Rack::Multipart::Parser` buffers the entire multipart **preamble** (bytes before the first boundary) in memory without any size limit. A client can send a large preamble followed by a valid boundary, causing significant memory use and potential process termination due to out-of-memory (OOM) conditions. ## Details While searching for the first boundary, the parser appends incoming data into a shared buffer (`@sbuf.concat(content)`) and scans for the boundary pattern: ```ruby @sbuf.scan_until(@body_regex) ``` If the boundary is not yet found, the parser continues buffering data indefinitely. There is no trimming or size cap on the preamble, allowing attackers to send arbitrary amounts of data before the first boundary. ## Impact Remote attackers can trigger large transient memory spikes by including a long preamble in multipart/form-data requests. The impact scales with allowed request sizes and concurrency, potentially causing worker crashes or severe slowdown due to garbage collection. ## Mitigation * **Upgrade:** Use a patched version of Rack that enforces a preamble size limit (e.g., 16 KiB) or discards preamble data entirely per [RFC 2046 § 5.1.1](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2046.html#section-5.1.1). * **Workarounds:** * Limit total request body size at the proxy or web server level. * Monitor memory and set per-process limits to prevent OOM conditions.

    Affected packages

    Package

    Name: rack

    Purl: pkg:gem/rack

    Affected ranges

    Type: ECOSYSTEM

    Events:

    Introduced- 0
    Fixed -2.2.19

    Affected versions

    0.1.0

    Common Vulnerability Scoring System

    Attack Vector
    Network
    Adjacent
    Local
    Physical
    Privileges Required
    None
    Low
    High
    User Interaction
    None
    Required
    Scope
    Unchanged
    Changed
    Confidentiality
    None
    Low
    High
    Integrity
    None
    Low
    High
    Availability
    None
    Low
    High
    GHSA-p543-xpfm-54cp | CVE-DB