GHSA-5ccf-884p-4jjq
Open WebUI Unauthenticated Multipart Boundary Denial of Service (DoS) Vulnerability
- Severity
- 7.5 / 10
- High · CVSS 3.0
- Exploit chance (EPSS)
- —
- No score published
- Known exploited
- No
- Not in CISA's catalog
- Weakness
- CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
- Fix
- None yet
- No fixed version published
Description
A Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability exists in open-webui/open-webui version 0.3.21. This vulnerability affects multiple endpoints, including /ollama/models/upload, /audio/api/v1/transcriptions, and /rag/api/v1/doc. The application processes multipart boundaries without authentication, leading to resource exhaustion. By appending additional characters to the multipart boundary, an attacker can cause the server to parse each byte of the boundary, ultimately leading to service unavailability. This vulnerability can be exploited remotely, resulting in high CPU and memory usage, and rendering the service inaccessible to legitimate users.
Affected versions
PyPI
| Package | Vulnerable | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| open-webui | <= 0.3.21 |
No fix yet |
npm
| Package | Vulnerable | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| open-webui | <= 0.3.21 |
No fix yet |
How to fix
No fixed version has been published yet. Until one is, remove or replace the package, or turn off or isolate the affected feature. This page updates when a fix ships.
Severity breakdown
CVSS 3.0 7.5
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Attack vector
- Network
- Attack complexity
- Low
- Privileges required
- None
- User interaction
- None
- Scope
- Unchanged
- Confidentiality
- None
- Integrity
- None
- Availability
- High
Weakness
CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
How to prevent it
- Architecture and Design: Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place. The login application should be protected against DoS attacks as much as possible. Limiting the database access, perhaps by caching result sets, can help minimize the resources expended. To further limit the potential for a DoS attack, consider tracking the rate of requests received from users and blocking requests that exceed a defined rate threshold.
- Architecture and Design: Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed. The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question. The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.
- Architecture and Design: Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
- Implementation: Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.
References
Advisories
Packages
Other links
Timeline
- Published
- Last updated by the source
Related advisories
| Advisory | Severity | Why it's related |
|---|---|---|
| GHSA-wvm9-9g5j-623f Open WebUI: Users denied by the OAuth role policy can still sign in via token exchange | Medium | Also affects open-webui |
| GHSA-4qg5-cxx4-g927 Open WebUI: Users denied by the OAuth domain allowlist or role policy can still sign in via token exchange | Medium | Also affects open-webui |
| GHSA-jqhh-cjmq-vmv6 Open WebUI: Any authenticated user can hang the server via a cyclic chat message history | Medium | Also affects open-webui |
| GHSA-5x7x-4c3c-qf5w Open WebUI: Server-side fetches reach blocked and internal hosts via unvalidated HTTP redirect targets | Medium | Also affects open-webui |
| GHSA-3cgp-3cqx-j8w2 Open WebUI: Any authenticated user can hang the server via message deletion in a cyclic chat tree | Medium | Also affects open-webui |
| GHSA-34r3-9m95-vq73 Open WebUI: Any authenticated user can reach the Azure platform channel via server-side web fetch | High | Also affects open-webui |
| GHSA-2724-6cpj-gf3v Open WebUI: Non-admin users can delete admin-owned external knowledge connections via knowledge base deletion | High | Also affects open-webui |
| GHSA-3pf7-q2g3-wj28 Open WebUI: Any authenticated user can inject chats into another user's folder via chat completions | Medium | Also affects open-webui |
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