vLLM before 0.29.0 CPU Exhaustion via unbounded cache_salt

vLLM versions before 0.29.0 contain a denial-of-service vulnerability in the cache_salt parameter accepted on OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic API endpoints, which lacks maximum length validation and is processed on the single EngineCore scheduler thread. Unauthenticated attackers can send HTTP requests with multi-hundred-megabyte salt values that trigger expensive pickle serialization and SHA-256 hashing, stalling the scheduler thread and denying service to all concurrent requests.