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Fencer Intel
medium 6.5

GHSA-hf3c-wxg2-49q9 json

vLLM vulnerable to Denial of Service by abusing xgrammar cache

published last yr. modified last yr.

cvss
6.5
version 3.1, GitHub
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
—
no score, EPSS covers CVEs only
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

### Impact

This report is to highlight a vulnerability in XGrammar, a library used by the structured output feature in vLLM. The XGrammar advisory is here: https://github.com/mlc-ai/xgrammar/security/advisories/GHSA-389x-67px-mjg3

The [xgrammar](https://xgrammar.mlc.ai/docs/) library is the default backend used by vLLM to support structured output (a.k.a. guided decoding). Xgrammar provides a required, built-in cache for its compiled grammars stored in RAM. xgrammar is available by default through the OpenAI compatible API server with both the V0 and V1 engines.

A malicious user can send a stream of very short decoding requests with unique schemas, resulting in an addition to the cache for each request. This can result in a Denial of Service by consuming all of the system's RAM.

Note that even if vLLM was configured to use a different backend by default, it is still possible to choose xgrammar on a per-request basis using the `guided_decoding_backend` key of the `extra_body` field of the request with the V0 engine. This per-request choice is not available when using the V1 engine. ### Patches

* https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/16283

### Workarounds

There is no way to workaround this issue in existing versions of vLLM other than preventing untrusted access to the OpenAI compatible API server.

### References

* https://github.com/mlc-ai/xgrammar/security/advisories/GHSA-389x-67px-mjg3

Patch / fix

  • pypi vllm 0.8.4

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CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
GitHub 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
pypi vllm
>=0.6.5, <0.8.4
0.8.4

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-1395 Dependency on Vulnerable Third-Party Component
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

References

Sources

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