Resource exhaustion in Vllm
CVE-2026-55646
vLLM is an inference and serving engine for large language models. From 0.22.0 to 0.23.0, the /v1/audio/transcriptions and /v1/audio/translations routes call request.file.read() to fully materialize an uploaded audio file into memory before vLLM checks the documented VLLM_MAX_AUDIO_CLIP_FILESIZE_MB compressed upload size limit (default 25 MB) later in the speech-to-text preprocessing step, so an API caller who can reach those routes can submit an oversized multipart upload and cause vLLM to allocate memory proportional to the uploaded file size before the request is rejected as too large, creating memory pressure or terminating the process depending on deployment resource limits. This issue is fixed in version 0.24.0.
Vulnerability class: DoS (Denial of Service)
EPSS: 0.003 (21.5th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 6.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.
Affected products
- Vllm
- Vllm-project Vllm — versions >= 0.22.0, < 0.24.0
Weakness classification (CWE)
References
- security-advisories@github.com (x_refsource_CONFIRM, Vendor Advisory)
- security-advisories@github.com (Patch, x_refsource_MISC, Issue Tracking)
- security-advisories@github.com (Patch, x_refsource_MISC)
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2026-55646?
- CVE-2026-55646 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Vllm, classified under Uncontrolled Resource Consumption. CVSS score: 6.5/10. Published 2026-07-06.
- How severe is CVE-2026-55646?
- Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.5 out of 10.