CVE-2024-31992: Mealie contains a DoS vulnerability in recipe importer

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2024-04-19 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-400

Description

Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner. Prior to 1.4.0, the safe_scrape_html function utilizes a user-controlled URL to issue a request to a remote server, however these requests are not rate-limited. While there are efforts to prevent DDoS by implementing a timeout on requests, it is possible for an attacker to issue a large number of requests to the server which will be handled in batches based on the configuration of the Mealie server. The chunking of responses is helpful for mitigating memory exhaustion on the Mealie server, however a single request to an arbitrarily large external file (e.g. a Debian ISO) is often sufficient to completely saturate a CPU core assigned to the Mealie container. Without rate limiting in place, it is possible to not only sustain traffic against an external target indefinitely, but also to exhaust the CPU resources assigned to the Mealie container. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.4.0.

Affected products

mealie-recipes mealie: before 1.4.0 — fixed in 1.4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: mealie-recipes mealie 1.4.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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