What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-5497: Unbounded Frame Count in video/jpeg Base64 Data URL Processing Leads to OOM DoS in vllm-project/vllm

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2026-06-11 · updated 2026-10-26
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

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 products

• vllm-project vllm: from 0.8.0 before 0.19.0 — fixed in 0.19.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: vllm-project vllm 0.19.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/commit/58ee61422169ce17e08248f8efa1e9df434fe395
• https://huntr.com/bounties/7bd92629-b396-4449-8f88-6c0092530eb4
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-5497
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2487813
• https://huntr.com/bounties/7bd92629-b396-4449-8f88-6c0092530eb4
• https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-5497.json

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