Resource exhaustion in Encode Starlette

CVE-2025-54121

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 · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.3 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.006 (48.4th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 48th percentile — 48.4% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2025-54121: held from 0.006 to 0.006.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.006 · newest: 0.006 · change: +0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-54121?
CVE-2025-54121 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Encode Starlette, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 5.3/10. Published 2025-07-21.
How severe is CVE-2025-54121?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.3 out of 10.
Is CVE-2025-54121 known to be exploited?
7 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.