CVE-2026-53539

HIGH

Python-Multipart: Quadratic-time querystring parsing with semicolon separators causes CPU denial of service

Title source: cna
STIX 2.1

Description

Python-Multipart is a streaming multipart parser for Python. Prior to 0.0.30, when parsing application/x-www-form-urlencoded bodies, QuerystringParser located the field separator with a two step lookup: it first scanned the entire remaining buffer for &, and only when no & existed anywhere ahead did it fall back to scanning for ;. For a body that uses ; as the separator and contains no &, every field iteration performed a full failed & scan over the entire remaining buffer before locating the nearby ;. With N semicolon separated fields in a chunk of size B, this yields O(B^2) byte comparisons per chunk. An attacker can submit a small crafted body of the form a;a;a;... and cause the parser to spend seconds of CPU per request. A handful of concurrent requests can exhaust worker processes. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.0.30.

References (1)

Core 1
Core References

Scores

CVSS v3 7.5
EPSS 0.0038
EPSS Percentile 30.8%
Attack Vector NETWORK
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CISA SSVC

Vulnrichment
Exploitation none
Automatable yes
Technical Impact partial

Details

CWE
CWE-400 CWE-407
Status published
Products (2)
fastapiexpert/python-multipart < 0.0.30
Kludex/python-multipart < 0.0.30
Published Jun 22, 2026
Tracked Since Jun 22, 2026