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Denial of Service via maliciously crafted HTTP or multipart segment headers

High
defnull published GHSA-p2m9-wcp5-6qw3 Mar 12, 2026

Package

pip multipart (pip)

Affected versions

<=1.3.0

Patched versions

1.2.2, 1.3.1

Description

Summary

The parse_options_header() function in multipart.py uses a regular expression with an ambiguous alternation, which can cause exponential backtracking (ReDoS) when parsing maliciously crafted HTTP or multipart segment headers. This can be abused for denial of service (DoS) attacks against web applications using this library to parse request headers or multipart/form-data streams.

Impact

Any WSGI or ASGI application using multipart.parse_form_data() directly or indirectly (e.g. while parsing multipart/form-data streams) is vulnerable. The slow-down is significant enough to block request handling threads for multiple seconds per request.

Affected versions

All versions up to and including 1.3.0 are affected. The issue is fixed in 1.2.2, 1.3.1 and 1.4.0-dev.

Severity

High

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVE ID

CVE-2026-28356

Weaknesses

Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

The product uses a regular expression with an inefficient, possibly exponential worst-case computational complexity that consumes excessive CPU cycles. Learn more on MITRE.

Credits