CVE-2025-61770
Rack's unbounded multipart preamble buffering enables DoS (memory exhaustion)
In short
Rack's multipart parser stores unlimited data from the start of a multipart request in memory without checks, allowing attackers to send huge preambles that exhaust memory and crash the application.
Technical detail
CVE-2025-61770 is a resource exhaustion vulnerability in Rack's multipart parser (CWE-400) affecting versions before 2.2.19, 3.1.17, and 3.2.2. An unauthenticated remote attacker can send a multipart/form-data request with an arbitrarily large preamble before the first boundary, causing unbounded memory buffering and OOM conditions. The vulnerability is mitigated in patched versions through preamble size limits or discard mechanisms.
Summary generated and translated by AI from the official description.
Rack is a modular Ruby web server interface. In versions prior to 2.2.19, 3.1.17, and 3.2.2, `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. 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. Versions 2.2.19, 3.1.17, and 3.2.2 enforce a preamble size limit (e.g., 16 KiB) or discard preamble data entirely. Workarounds include limiting total request body size at the proxy or web server level and monitoring memory and set per-process limits to prevent OOM conditions.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
rack · rackWant to know if your infrastructure is exposed to this?
Talk to TrueHacking →References
https://github.com/rack/rack/commit/589127f4ac8b5cf11cf88fb0cd116ffed4d2181ehttps://github.com/rack/rack/commit/d869fed663b113b95a74ad53e1b5cae6ab31f29ehttps://github.com/rack/rack/commit/e08f78c656c9394d6737c022bde087e0f33336fdhttps://github.com/rack/rack/security/advisories/GHSA-p543-xpfm-54cp