vLLM: denial of service
vLLM versions 0.8.0 and later are vulnerable to an Out-of-Memory (OOM) Denial of Service (DoS) attack due to unbounded frame count processing in the VideoMediaIO.load_base64() method. When processing video/jpeg data URLs, the method splits the base64 data string on commas to extract individual JPEG frames without enforcing a frame count limit. An attacker can exploit this by crafting a single API request containing thousands of comma-separated base64-encoded JPEG frames in a data URL, causing the server to decode all frames into memory and crash due to excessive memory consumption. This vulnerability is reachable via the OpenAI-compatible chat completions API and does not require authentication.
Affected versions
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| vllm PyPI | >= 0.8.0, < 0.19.0 | 0.19.0 |
Details and references
- CVSS 3.0
- CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Severity from
- GitHub (reviewed advisory)
- Weakness
- CWE-400, CWE-770
- Also known as
- CVE-2026-5497, PYSEC-2026-2302
- nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-5497
- github.com/vllm-project/vllm/commit/58ee61422169ce17e08248f8efa1e9df434fe395
- access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:33524
- access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:33531
- access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-5497
- bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2487813
- github.com/pypa/advisory-database/tree/main/vulns/vllm/PYSEC-2026-2302.yaml
- github.com/vllm-project/vllm
- huntr.com/bounties/7bd92629-b396-4449-8f88-6c0092530eb4
- security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-5497.json